humanist studies & the digital age, 3.1 (2013) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.3.1.3076 7 “textualities in the digital age” art farley, university of oregon the third issue of humanist studies & the digital age is partially devoted to the proceedings of a symposium held at the university of oregon on april 14, 2012, entitled “textualities in the digital age”. the symposium gathered together a diverse group of scholars in digital humanities, information sciences, law, and computer science to provide widely varying perspectives regarding questions as to how the study of historical texts and the creation of new texts have changed with the advent of digital technologies. advances in communication technology have altered the notion of text throughout history. with the adoption of the printing press in western europe during the second half of the fifteenth century, written texts were liberated from the constraints of hand-copied documents. the printing press led to the mass production of books. suddenly thousands of pages a day could be produced by a single printing press compared to the few produced by a single person handcopying a text. prior to this revolution, the common “text” of the day for communicating news and current public issues was not written, but was the spoken word or song. with the advent of the printing press, daily newspapers and alternative philosophical and political books appeared. the spread of the diverse ideas and opinions that the new technology enabled would lead to revolt in the church and eventually to the rise of science, philosophy, the expression of personal freedoms and desires, and nationalistic fervor throughout europe. as for impacts on the text itself, the notion of edition, reflecting a particular mass printing of a textual document, became an important, new concept. having a text published, thereby gaining access to the printing presses that would create a released edition, became a critical, gatekeeping step in the production of new texts. the controlling role of editorial review and publication remained effective until the advent of digital communication technologies began to overturn these key elements of the textual world. the impacts of advances in communication technology upon the text have been complex and multifaceted. such technology directly alters the means of http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ humanist studies & the digital age farley 3.1 spring 2013 8 production and distribution of a text. indirectly this affects what is included in a text and how that message is encoded in the text. these are but a few of the topics to be considered by textualities research. digital technologies have broken many of the rules of previous textual technologies. no longer is editorial review required to unleash a text that can now become widely available to the world in seconds. this change has had dramatic consequences for writers and readers alike. while information can be made available almost immediately, there is no longer control over its source or veracity. the structure of texts as individual, complete entities in themselves is changing. documents can not only cite related works but provide (hyper)links that allow near immediate access to those works. a text, while always occurring within a historical network of related texts, now becomes literally part of an immediately available web of texts that any reader must confront and decide how to navigate. more and more these texts become dynamic entities, commented upon by readers who forward the amended text to others for their reading and commentary. furthermore, texts have become multi-media entities, including video and sound, as digital technology provides a common basis for encoding all forms of information. the widespread adoption of digital communication technologies has opened up a broad range of research questions, resulting in studies within psychology, sociology, education, computing, and the humanities regarding our various relationships to text: what these relationships have been, what they are, and what they may become. the symposium “textualities in the digital age” provided a sampling of this research, addressing some of these questions. the first session of the symposium consisted of two talks that discussed how digital technology is changing the way we relate to older, extant texts. massmo lollini described the petrarch open book project he leads that is being developed at the university of oregon. the main focus of the project has been the visualization of recent versions of petrarch’s canzoniere from the diplomatic edition prepared by ettore modigliani in 1904 to the critical edition prepared by giuseppe savoca over the last decade. in addition, there is an effort to create a comprehensive database system for musical adaptations of petrarch’s canzoniere, exceeding all existing archives in scope and content. we immediately see one impact of digital technology upon important historical texts, as the project website notes: “petrarch is again in sight” (http://petrarch.uoregon.edu/). the distributional power of global digital technology, bringing historical works out of the closet, is evident in much of the work discussed at the symposium. beyond mere distribution, another effort is to link versions of the text to relevant commentary and translations, creating a readily accessible academic world around the original text. finally, there is the inclusion of mechanisms whereby an http://petrarch.uoregon.edu/ humanist studies & the digital age farley 3.1 spring 2013 9 interested community of researchers can annotate and comment on the text, forming a social as well as textual network of interest. the second talk in the first session was presented by abigail firey, who discussed the carolingian canon law project hosted at the university of kentucky (http://ccl.rch.uky.edu/). the project is dedicated to building a database of latin texts comprising any canon law that might have been available, in theory, to carolingian readers. as such, there are texts from the fourth century up through the ninth century and into the tenth. the primary goals of the project are to collect highly accurate transcriptions of the original, handwritten canons and to provide search methods for locating elements of interest in the texts. the latter represents another transformation that digital technology offers to scholars of historical texts: the abilities to quickly search and extract relevant pieces of a text, to view or compile statistics regarding the texts, and to compare related texts or versions of a text for differences. again, creating a virtual space in which a community of researchers can collaborate in their studies by providing new texts and commentary is a key element of research in digital textualities. the second session focused on efforts to apply standard computer science methodologies to problems in language and text. stephanie wood, of the wired humanities project at the university of oregon, described her team’s efforts at compiling an online nahuatl dictionary. this is one of several projects underway to create online, multimedia, searchable dictionaries of indigenous languages of mesoamerica, both historical and modern. other languages currently under study are mixtec, mayan, and p’urhe’pecha. here we see the power of digital technology to maintain or archive languages that are disappearing, as modern languages that are distributed in large part by digital technology now dominate the global exchange of ideas. turning texts into global documents is having a homogenizing effect on discourse and the languages used. the second talk of that session was given by richard furuta of texas a&m university. furuta was a founder of the cervantes project (http://cervantes.tamu.edu/v2/cpi/index.html), which was one of the first digital humanities efforts to study a particular author and text in depth. furuta has considered research questions about the notion of digital documents and their formalization for over twenty years. he provided a general overview of digital texts from a computer science perspective and discussed what some of the problems and opportunities are for future developments. a lively keynote address for the symposium was given by stanley fish, entitled, “if you can count it, they will come.” fish, who is presently the davidson-kahn distinguished university professor of humanities and law at florida international university, is a distinguished author and humanist much of http://ccl.rch.uky.edu/ http://cervantes.tamu.edu/v2/cpi/index.html humanist studies & the digital age farley 3.1 spring 2013 10 whose published research has been directed at issues of textuality. his presentation offered a critique of the sometimes rather simplistic approaches to digital research in the humanities and discussed the true character of reading and writing and their interactions. as a blogger for the new york times, fish has become acutely aware of the impacts that digital communication technologies are having on texts. he has moved from a world where he controlled every word of every book he published to the world of blogs, which are more informal, brief, and interactive, with readers’ comments becoming part of the texts and out of control of the original author. consistent with our journal’s view of the expanded notion of digital text, we include a video of dr. fish’s presentation as an entry in this edition. the afternoon sessions were more informal and practical in nature. karen estlund and john russell of the university of oregon library presented a discussion on the transitioning model of library services as it adapts to growing emphasis on digital documents and accessibility. estlund reviewed the state of the field for library support of digital scholarship from digitization to publication and preservation of content while russell described a model of thinking about the modern research library as a service rather than merely as the sum of its collections, challenging our assumptions about the value that libraries provide to scholars and how this relationship may change in the future. stephen fickas of the computer and information science department at the university of oregon presented an overview of his group’s recent work on electronic textbooks. the focus of the research is to turn textbooks into a more supportive and active learning environment. an electronic textbook can evaluate a student’s understanding of the material by presenting questions; depending on the student’s responses, the textbook can “decide” what material to next present, i.e., further review or new content. links to a professor’s explanations of material in the text are included, as are links to other student comments and questions, creating a social context for learning. again, the notion of text as a completed work at publication time is changed into a dynamic, responsive entity that is different every time it is read. the symposium concluded with a lively discussion of emerging notions of text as influenced by digital technology. in particular, the incorporation of artificially intelligent elements into the textual context was discussed. with rapid expansion in the abilities and applications of data and text mining just beginning to appear, as in the siri application on iphones or the watson system that defeated human experts on jeopardy, the idea of intelligent texts that automatically present information relevant to the expressed interests of a reader is becoming reality. how this technology will impact the textualities of the future has yet to be seen. humanist studies & the digital age, 3.1 (2013) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.3.1.1596 53 the princeton dante project robert hollander, princeton university history: the princeton dante project (henceforth pdp) was the direct result of a suggestion by a former student of mine, susan saltrick (princeton ’78), that i should meet with bob stein, at that time (late 1994) one of the most impressive innovators in the field of so-called humanities computing, with the aim of developing a second large-scale dante project. my initial response to susan was that i was too busy with the first, the dartmouth dante project (ddp), for which i had been serving as project director since 1982, even to think about a second. (the ddp was a communal effort, as would be the pdp, involving people on both sides of the technological divide, professors of literature in the department of french and italian at dartmouth and computing personnel from that institution's kiewit computation center.) susan convinced me that no harm could possibly come from spending some time with mr. stein. and so the three of us did meet at his office in manhattan, along with some of his associates. it is sufficient to report that, from the expert advice and encouragement i received from saltrick, stein, and stein’s collaborators, i was inspired to conceive a new project that would do many of the things for a student of dante that the ddp was obviously not designed to do. that earlier project was tasked with doing a fairly simple chore: making machine-readable the most notable commentaries to the commedia in the six hundred and sixty years separating the first commentaries from the current ones (1322-1982; we would eventually add three still more recent ones) and building a mechanism to search them effectively. now that we had made significant progress with establishing that first dante database, it was almost inevitable to envision an electronic edition of the poem with facing english translation (concerning which there will be more in the next paragraph). this “edition” would also have the following links: explanatory notes for nearly every passage in the poem; philological notes for verses containing problematic textual readings; and historical notes for things, places, and persons referred to in a particular verse. in addition, there would be links to all commentators in the ddp (then several dozen, now some seventy-five) who had dealt with the particular verse or passage under consideration. there would also be links to an italian voicing of the poem, broken into tercets (the three-line unit that is the basis of the poem’s structure): the user would have the option of hearing a single tercet, or the screen “page,” or the entire canto. finally, we http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ humanist studies & the digital age hollander 3.1 spring 2013 54 would offer a small sampling of illustrations of various scenes in the poem, including the most celebrated series of these, that of the great nineteenth-century illustrator gustave doré, but also the much less well known but striking lithographs, one from all but one of the hundred cantos, by the twentieth-century artist amos nattini. (the dalì illustrations are also available by connecting to another site, as are a number of others.) in addition, there is a collection of maps and diagrams; these are not keyed to specific passages but serve as a sort of appendix. there were to be (and are) other features as well: paget toynbee’s brief but full biography of dante, along with a 1500-item bibliography of critical work referred to in the notes to the poem, as well as summaries of the contents of each canto. the question of which translation to use was resolved by my wife, the poet jean hollander. i was on leave in florence for the spring semester of 1997. we were living on the grounds of the former machiavelli estate, across the arno, with an enviable prospect of the center of the city, at eye level with the dome of the duomo. one day in february, soon after our arrival, my wife found me looking over a piece of john sinclair’s translation, which i had chosen as the one we would use for the pdp and which we (i and graduate students frank ordiway and lauren scancarelli seem) had modernized, getting rid of the worst cases of nineteenth-century poetic diction (e.g., "thee" and "thou," which both became "you"). when jean examined a piece of that text she declared it to be unsayable. i reminded her that she had on occasion taught dante to students using sinclair’s translation and challenged her, asking if she thought she could do better. her answer was to pick up the several pages of the first canto of the poem and carry it to her work space in that former machiavelli dovecote in which we were so happily ensconced. a few days later she handed me a similarly-sized document, her revised version of sinclair’s prose, now become free verse in jean’s reshaping. what she presented was, for all its problems, a clear improvement over the original. i asked jean if she wanted to translate the entire poem with me. she said she did, even after i warned her of how much work she was taking on. we published the first volume of our translation with doubleday in 2000, acknowledging our debt to sinclair several times in an opening note. in the successive versions after the first that we did of each canto, sinclair disappeared from our view as we worked from dante’s words rather than his translation. on the other hand, we still insist on our original debt to sinclair, even as we did in that prefatory note eleven years ago. in the winter of 1996 i made application to the nyu “computer boot camp” directed by red burns, a faculty member at nyu, in association with bob stein. i was accepted and spent most of the month of june commuting by rail from humanist studies & the digital age hollander 3.1 spring 2013 55 princeton to greenwich village, where i had in fact grown up. the project went extremely well. the first day i drew on the blackboard a model of the design of the project as i foresaw it. i wish that i had made and kept a copy of that diagram, for that basic design was close to what we eventually produced -a disk with representations of the various components of the pdp. i am grateful to everyone connected with that boot camp, teachers, trainees at nyu, and fellow students alike. that experience ensured that the pdp began its life on the best imaginable footing. when i went to talk to princeton’s humanities computing people, then led by jacqueline brown, the reasons for creating the pdp practically explained themselves. to my great pleasure, princeton wanted to undertake the project. and now we needed to solve the least interesting but not inconsequential part of the problem: money. the national endowment for the humanities (neh) had funded, bless its heart, the ddp at a time in which few humanists (at least few serving on neh panels) knew anything about computers (1983). neh had earlier funded one part of david packard’s huge greek project, “ibycus,” which eventually resulted in the computerized thesaurus linguae grecae. the endowment’s official position was, perhaps understandably so at that time, that humanities and computers were a marriage that needed to be studied more carefully before federal dollars should be advanced in their further support. it is surprising (as i know because i was allowed to read, as were all applicants in those days, the anonymous versions of the panelists’ responses and found that these were as untutored as one might have feared) that the project came through with funding. i think (this is merely my conjecture) that the then-director of the neh’s division of research, harold cannon, had seen the promise of the ddp and had shepherded the proposal through a very rocky pasture indeed. we later received further funding from neh for a necessary second cycle during 1985-88. to my surprise (and no little delight) dartmouth managed to put the whole thing together for an opening ceremony, with, as i recall, a dozen commentaries running on their mainframe, on october 8, 1988. . my most amusing memory of that celebrative weekend is the response of a visiting dantean rival, a person who had already frequently not been impressed by my work, who peered into a computer screen and said, exasperatedly, “oh, it's just benvenuto da imola,” as though it were normal to look at a screen and see a fourteenth-century commentary to dante, as though the whole project were a step backward from going to the university library and opening up a volume of the five-volume set of the vernon/lacaita edition of 1887. the ddp, in the nearly quarter century since it opened to consultation from around the world, has in excess of a million contacts per year from, in a given month, more than fifty countries, led, unsurprisingly, by italy. humanist studies & the digital age hollander 3.1 spring 2013 56 that was then and the pdp was now. i thought the proposal i had drafted was the best one i had ever submitted for financial support. this time, however, the neh response was not only negative, but firmly so. i thought that the pdp had been held hostage to its successful elder sister. or perhaps my view of the younger sister overrated her charms. at any rate, princeton’s financial involvement "paid" for more than dartmouth's and the total amount of cash required was, most fortunately, not nearly so much. the ddp eventually had cost over a million dollars in cash from a number of foundations and individuals. the pdp was much less exigent with regard to outside funding for four reasons: (1) digitization of materials had become less expensive in the intervening dozen years; (2) there were far fewer materials to be made machinereadable in the first place; (3) princeton put more of its own resources into this effort than dartmouth had, mainly a goodly piece of time from five or six of its employees in computing; and (4) most of the project was essentially completed within a single academic year. major support for the pdp came from the andrew w. mellon foundation (as is frequently the case, the first to see merit in a challenging proposal), the gladys krieble delmas foundation, and the edward t. cone foundation. within princeton the project benefited from a grant from the 250th anniversary fund for innovation in undergraduate education. in 2000 there were two substantial gifts from individuals: george castell and paul gridley. (mr. gridley also helped to fund the renovation of the dartmouth dante project in 2004.) the clover foundation provided an emergency grant to ensure the completion of the first stage of the project in the fall of 1998. where the ddp had had to raise more than $1,000,000 in cash, the pdp needed roughly one fifth of that amount, since the university supplied, as its contribution, so much of the necessary brainwork at no charge to the project. there were nine of us charged with designing and building the pdp and we met fairly frequently during the course of that academic year. the cast of characters included four people who worked for cit (computing and information technology -now oit, office of information technology): kirk alexander (school of engineering), peter batke (cit), james beldock (independent software consultant), paula brett (cit), james chu (cit), robert hollander (french and italian), catherine kunicki (independent designer), lauren seem (graduate student in comparative literature), and jonathan wilding (cit). there were several others, as well, including kirk alexander’s younger colleague, kevin perry. he and paula brett are the main contacts for the few items of housekeeping that are required now, a dozen years later, on an ongoing basis. indeed, i spent a good part of the early summer of 2011 reviewing and updating with the two of them the entire database, some of which had fallen into disrepair or obsolescence. humanist studies & the digital age hollander 3.1 spring 2013 57 function: since the pdp offers a tutorial that users may consult and since much of what the database offers is straightforwardly intuitive, those who have never or rarely visited the site are here invited to have a look at the online tutorial or, if they prefer, at the project itself. the tutorial runs fewer than thirteen minutes and will give a concrete sense of what is contained in the database and how one consults those data: http://etcweb.princeton.edu/dante/tutorial/index.html. some observations about the project’s functionality follow. in 2004 i experienced an illness that left me housebound for several months. i would not have been able to “do dante” in the way that i have learned to trust and enjoy without the pdp -handsome remuneration for my share in the toil necessary to create it. most of the work that i have published on dante is based in the close study of a particular text or series of texts. (given that predilection, it will not seem accidental that i have written a commentary on the commedia -it also is contained in the pdp.) thus the pdp reflects its designer’s way of conceptualizing his own way of approaching this great poem. it is important to know that dante considered himself not only the maker of his poem, but also its first commentator. in addition to its wider concerns, the epistle to cangrande (1318?) is in part dedicated to analysis of the first sixteen verses of the paradiso. it is true that, in the years between 1819 and the present, more than a few, those who do not think the lines of argument found in the epistle are “dantean” in nature, have raised their voices in dissent. the reader should know that the present writer is of the strong opinion that the document was, in fact, composed by dante (see my polemically titled dante’s epistle to cangrande, michigan 1993) and is in accord with what the poem exhibits as its own instruction on how it should be interpreted -a view that is increasingly shared among dantists, if not by the few remaining hard-line dissidents. whether or not dante was the author of the first one, no other literary work in the western tradition has been the focus of so many line-by-line commentaries. and that fact tells us something about its author and his method of writing. dante, in fact, practiced self-exegesis (he was perhaps the first in western letters to do so) in two of his preceding works, the vita nuova and the convivio. it is thus not at all surprising to find him doing so, if fragmentarily, in response to his own commedia. the focus of the pdp is on the meaning of the smaller units of the poem -a single word, a single verse, a single tercet. this is not to suggest that larger issues or themes -empire vs. republic, the role of the papacy in the political world, the efficacy of prayer, the freedom of the will, etc., etc. -do not come frequently into play, both in the poem and in the notes that accompany it, but that larger concerns must always be approached with the http://etcweb.princeton.edu/dante/tutorial/index.html humanist studies & the digital age hollander 3.1 spring 2013 58 details contrived by the poet much in mind. the three kinds of notes available in the text of every canto (interpretive, historical, and philological) reflect different concerns but are all appropriate to nuanced study. (currently only the first six cantos have philological notes, but the rest are coming in the next two years, as part of my next project, a three-volume study of 101 cruces in the poem, one from each canto.) the entire project also benefits from the presence of all of dante’s less known and revered works, not only the vita nuova, de vulgari eloquentia, convivio, and monarchia, but his nearly one hundred vernacular lyrics, his four latin eclogues, his thirteen epistles, and a treatise (the latin questio de aqua et terra). all of these are accompanied by standard english translations. and all of them are searchable by the search mechanism that was designed into the project early on, mainly, if memory serves, by peter batke. the historical notes all derive from paget toynbee’s concise dictionary of proper names and notable matters in the works of dante (oxford: clarendon press, 1914), as revised by charles s. singleton (oxford: clarendon press, 1968). these notes remain the single most helpful assemblage of such material in the pdp. the fact that, for many items, the user is able to choose between a shorter and a longer version of the material turned up in a search is a boon. let us examine the situation confronting someone who wants to know more about the mysterious prophecy of the “five hundred ten and five” (cinquecento dieci e cinque; purg. xxxiii.43). this example also serves to illustrate a potential problem facing users of this mechanism in the database. if one types in these four italian words in the “toynbee title search” box, one gets a null result. however, typing in the same four words in the “toynbee text search” box takes the user to the internally coded entry “dxv” (the roman numerals for the number 515 by which scholars refer to this particular bit of business. the pdp does not do all the users’ thinking for them and there are and always will be some rough edges). generally, once one has a “hit,” the default value for display is the condensed version, the “summarized entry,” brief and to the point; it may give searchers who want to get an overall sense of the problematic nature of an item encountered in the text of the poem all that they need. an option exists at the bottom of the “summarized entry” to access the ”long entry”; doing so, one finds that it includes far more information, including, on occasion, some bibliography, should the user want to have such. in my opinion, the toynbee material is some of the most valuable available in the pdp, and i remain thankful to oxford university press for granting us permission to include this material in the database. if this toynbee option is perhaps the quickest and most helpful way of bracketing the elements of a certain kind of query, it hardly exhausts what is available within the pdp. if one wants to know what the person who designed humanist studies & the digital age hollander 3.1 spring 2013 59 the project thinks about a particular passage, one clicks on the “commentary” portion of the menu for the verse and gets a good deal more information. however, one obvious problem that remains is that the user now has the views of only two individuals. what if he or she really wants to deal with centuries’ worth of disagreement over this, one of the most contention-causing loci in the poem? here’s where the pdp can be most helpful, taking the user to all responses found over the past six hundred and ninety years in a commentary tradition that is simply the richest ever to have grown alongside the text of a single poem. the fifty-four of the seventy-five glossators (some of whom did not finish their commentaries while others may have ducked this difficult passage) collected in the dartmouth dante project (of the perhaps two hundred commentaries that exist, some completed, others abandoned, in the annals of dante scholarship) do not, among themselves, guarantee that the dantist who consults them will come away no more confused than when entering the selva oscura of this difficult poem. what they do unfailingly reveal is the difficulty and attractiveness of this poem. it has had a hold on readers for nearly eight centuries now -and there is no sign that its attractiveness is waning. on the contrary, the extraordinary success of the actor roberto benigni, not only in italy, but in the rest of europe and in north and south america, who has been bringing dante to a wider audience in his road show “tutto dante,” tells us that, in a time not noted for its appreciation of great literature, dante’s success is wider than ever. to say that the commedia is the greatest single poem ever written does not represent an obviously untrue claim; in any case, there are probably less than a handful of other plausible contestants for such a claim. suffice it to say that the commedia has enriched many a life and that the odds very strongly favor its continuing to do so. it may be helpful to add that, if a user has questions or suggestions, there is a form for communicating with us on the pdp welcome screen (one simply clicks on the legend “bugs? comments?”). in the twelve years of our existence we have had quite a few of these, some pointing out typographical and other mechanical errors (assistance that is most welcome), others asking for information not available within the parameters of the database. while a few of these questions have not been answerable (at least not by me), i have responded immediately to every one of them and promise to do so in the future. humanist studies & the digital age, 2.1 (2012) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.2.1.3016 91 "liquid/cloudy/foggy: for a critique of fluid textuality" massimo riva, brown university abstract: the title of this paper is inspired by the book edited by domenico fiormonte entitled canoni liquidi (liquid canons). of course, the adjective “liquid” refers to zygmunt bauman’s term at which my critique is also indirectly aimed. the title of fiormonte’s book seems to suggest equivalence between textual “mobility” and “liquidity.” yet the “liquefying” of (literary) canons and the emergence of new intrinsically kinetic or fluid forms of mobile textuality requires a critical assessment that does not prematurely celebrate the funeral of the text as we know it but pays close attention to what seems to be waiting for us beyond the text, as suggested in francesco fiorentino’s recent edited volume. this means paying attention to what in my recent book, il futuro della letteratura (the future of literature), i call digital incunabula: objects/textual tools, devices programmed in a twofold, reciprocal sense, whose linguistic properties and rules interact and interfere with the algorithmic procedures of artificial languages. in this programmed and programmable interaction and intermediation one can perceive the horizon of incomprehensibility of posthuman language, providing a new aporetic dimension to gadamer’s assertion that “the being that can be understood is language.“ this assertion is by now the most significant issue in the horizon of literary (digital) arts. il titolo di questo saggio si ispira (e reagisce) a quello del libro curato da domenico fiormonte canoni liquidi. naturalmente, l’aggettivo rimanda al termine reso corrente da zygmunt bauman che rimane sullo sfondo della mia critica. il titolo del libro di fiormonte sembra suggerire una equivalenza tra testo “mobile” e “liquido.” ma la liquefazione (e liquidazione) dei canoni (letterari) e l’emergere di nuove forme di testualità intrinsecamente cinetica o fluida richiedono una valutazione critica che non celebri prematuramente il funerale del testo, come lo conosciamo, ma presti attenzione a quello che sembra attenderci “al di là del testo” (per parafrasare il titolo del libro curato da f. fiorentino con cui dialogo nel mio intervento). nel mio e-book sul futuro della letteratura dedicato all’opera d’arte letteraria nell’epoca della sua (ri)producibilità digitale, ho affrontato la questione dal punto di vista di quelli che definisco “incunaboli digitali”: oggetti/strumenti testuali, dispositivi programmati in un duplice, reciproco senso, in cui le proprietà e le regole del humanist studies & the digital age massimo riva 2.1 fall 2012 92 linguaggio (letterario) inter-agiscono e inter-feriscono con le procedure algoritmiche dei linguaggi “artificiali.” in questa inter-azione o intermediazione programmata e programmatica si delinea l’orizzonte di incomprensibilità del linguaggio post-umano, dando una nuova dimensione aporetica all’asserto di g. gadamer (citato da f. fiorentino) che “il linguaggio è l’essere che può essere compreso.” questo asserto è ormai la domanda che si staglia all’orizzonte delle arti letterarie (digitali). my essay discusses three books, including mine, and all that follows should be considered as a series of remarks suggested, or provoked, by my reading of the two books edited by the organizers of the conference “il testo è mobile,” held in rome on january 10, 2012. the very title of this paper is inspired by the book edited by d. fiormonte and entitled canoni liquidi (liquid canons). of course, the adjective “liquid” refers to the term coined by zygmunt bauman at which my critique is also indirectly aimed. the title of this symposium seems to suggest equivalence between textual “mobility” and “liquidity.” yet, the “liquefying” of (literary) canons and the emerging of new forms of mobile textuality require a critical assessment that does not prematurely celebrate the funeral of text as we know it but pays close attention to what in my book about the future of literature in the age of its digital (re)production i have defined digital incunabula (riva, il futuro della letteratura) the loss of centrality of text is not a taboo any more, in the humanities. rather, it is now seen as an opportunity for a theoretical and methodological turn, which would bring the humanities closer to current developments in the social sciences or even the life sciences. i am thinking of the “neural” or “neurological” turn in cultural studies, for example. yet, whether we embrace this opportunity or not by and large depends on a fundamental ambivalence that we humanists deep down feel in an age in which models and forms (as well as canons) inherited from the past are not only “liquefied” but also, apparently, “liquidated” on the digital platform. as humanist and literary scholars, we are committed to the preservation of our past, the repository of our literary heritage, as much as we are to the construction of our future, the re-generation of that heritage within the new mode of cultural production. yet, we do not often see clearly enough how the two things actually go together indeed too often we see them as goals opposing each other. the only way out of this ambivalence is to realize that our own contribution to the development of the digital mode of cultural production entirely depends on our ability to boldly convert and re-invent within it models and forms inherited from our cultural (literary) past. disenfranchising text from the history of print culture is something that the literary (digital) avant-garde has been doing for at least the past twenty years, continuing the mission that historic avant-gardes (in the early 20 th -century and the 1960s) had already undertaken. when, in il futuro della letteratura, i speak about the future of literature, therefore i mean both the entirety of “works” tagged or codified as such in our cultural humanist studies & the digital age massimo riva 2.1 fall 2012 93 archives and the symbolic form of cultural production which is undergoing today a radical transformation: now more than ever, the survival of the first (the repository, our literary memory) and that of the second (the cultural form, our literary imagination) depend on each other. as our literary heritage turns into a cloud of (textual) data, the cloud itself changes shape. today practically all of “literature” artifacts made of language is digital, including the literature that gets printed. in my book, i speak about those artifacts that are born digital, that is, literary artifacts intentionally produced with programmable devices. of course, the literary text is always already a programmed linguistic, stylistic and rhetorical device: it is programmed by the author – and sometimes re-programmed by the reader to do something, tell a story, recite a poem, etc., according to more or less strict linguistic, that is grammatical, syntactical, semantic rules or constraints. from this point of view, the (literary) text can be considered the software of the literary machine. from another point of view, however, one can consider the text itself as the machine, the programmable device. yet another perspective considers the hardware and software inextricably intertwined, as in a printed book, or an e-book. now, in the age of digital incunabula, as it moves from print to electronic formats, the literary text undergoes (or is augmented by) another programming layer. literary codes do not transfer untouched from a medium to the other. to speak of different “supports” for the same text is therefore utterly inadequate. under the hood of the literary machine, different forms of language (human, mechanic, or machinic, “natural” and “artificial”) interact and often interfere with each other. but here is the important thing: when we speak of programming or reprogramming text (or the literary work of art as a textual device), we mean both the reprogramming of linguistic codes or rules according to the procedural protocols (algorithms) of computing devices and the programming or reprogramming of digital devices in order to process and perform literary procedures: the “textual instruments” of which, for example, speak john cayley or noah wardrip-fruin (two of the artists i consider in my book) are complex, multilayered devices in which programming and literary codes expressively interact with each other (riva 179-180). the result of this inter-action, or, to quote kate hayles, “inter-mediation” between literary and computing codes is to produce hybrid symbolic-artificial objects (artifacts): indeed, in my book i also claim that the hybrid, in this sense, emerges as the most compelling ontological genre (or category) of digital literature, the ontological mode of a multi-layered, programmable device (hayles, electronic literature 51; riva 105). the most interesting and, from my point of view, successful works of digital literature about which i write, are those which highlight this hybrid ontology of programmed literary objects, without sacrificing the pleasure that we traditionally associate with the literary experience. this pleasure is only partially due to the surprise and wonder effect produced by the mobility acquired by the text. rather, as espen aarseth argued in cybertext. perspectives on ergodic literature, a book published fifteen years ago, it also depends on the active, ergodic role of the “reader” or “user” or co-producer (cyber-text releases a high degree of ergonomic energy). but what does this all mean, exactly? granted, human culture is not text-centric humanist studies & the digital age massimo riva 2.1 fall 2012 94 anymore, perhaps we are indeed moving beyond the text, to quote the title of the book edited by francesco fiorentino. fifteen years ago, mario ricciardi edited a similar book entitled oltre il testo: gli ipertesti (beyond text, hypertext) which seemed to provide an easy answer to the question about the future, or the “beyond,” of textuality. those were the years in which the meta-model of the net (or the web) was beginning to impose itself: the beyond of textuality seemed to be its empowered version, hyper-text in both its social and cognitive meaning. yet, fifteen years later, we are not so sure that our ever more powerful or hyper-linguistic devices are indeed only that (the computer as an alphabetic machine, as umberto eco used to say). 1 beyond the declining fortune of literary hypertexts a more radical questioning seems to emerge, in fiorentino’s introduction to his book, where he writes: “with the digital revolution the age has come to an end in which we could think, with g. gadamer, that ‘the being that can be understood is language’ ” (fiorentino 16). in short, this is really the “beyond” that we have to envision. the mobility of text is only an epiphenomenon of this more profound transformation. consciousness-language-writing: this hermeneutic circle (which also included the freudian un-conscious) is now inserted in a more complex circuit, in the age of programmable media. this is the issue facing the humanities as they come to consider (to say “understand” would be excessive) the alphanumeric, and algorithmic properties of our hybrid cultural devices. indeed, understanding as the mode of humanistic thinking (according to the tradition that dates back to w. dilthey) is now a questionable tenet, albeit one perhaps the humanities should preserve. the digital mode of production is based on a different ontology in which (i quote again fiorentino) textuality is no longer able “to capture all the knowledge that an epoch or a society has of itself” (fiorentino 23). this is indeed the paradox we are confronted with: at a time when written communication seems to literally explode and (paraphrasing an old latin proverb) scripta volant everywhere, writing in its strict linguistic sense loses its privileged epistemological status within our culture. this is not simply due to the fact that our cultural processes “are nowadays embedded within a plurality of media” (fiorentino 23). (wasn’t this always so? only the hegemony of text in print culture has obscured the intrinsic multimediality of human culture, across the ages). and it is not only due to the fact that, since the 1960s, with barthes, derrida, foucault, deleuze and guattari, etc., the “mobility” of writing has been unleashed, liberated from its metaphysical constraints. perhaps more than anything else, it is the demise of the book as a cultural meta-model in the postgutenberg era that un-bound the text, both in a physical and a symbolic sense. the book as metaphor of the world has been replaced by the net. fiorentino speaks of “infinite nets” in his introduction to his book (9-59). even the (modern) encyclopedia from this point of view was a meta-book. thinking in terms of networks (rather than corpora or canons, for example) has become a commonplace even for humanists, as texts lose their corporeal features and become assimilated to dis-continuous, disembodied processes. so the question we have to ask ourselves really is: what awaits us, not beyond text, but beyond hyper-text? in my book, i suggest that the best electronic or digital literature invites us to consider precisely this question. hypertext, of course, emerged in the 1960s as an humanist studies & the digital age massimo riva 2.1 fall 2012 95 exquisitely literary construct: later, ted nelson explicitely spoke of the literary inspiration of his idea of hyper-text as expressed in the title to his book, literary machines. yet, hypertext as a genre (or a model) of digital literature flourished later and withered. already years ago, bob coover spoke (somewhat nostalgically) of hypertext as the golden age of electronic literature, already over at the turn of the last century. yet, all forms of digital literature have this in common with the hypertexts of yesteryear: they consciously, intentionally, reflectively adopt the computer or other programmable devices as their “posttextual” instruments. not just to disrupt the “linear” logic of traditional narrative or recalculate the constraints of poetic forms. but to re-think our own primary connection with language as the only understandable mode of human being. beyond language, beyond understanding. the artists of which i write in my book present us with an interesting critical paradox: they work in a niche, undoubtedly (when all the culture is somewhat, at least technologically, converted into avant-garde, avant-garde is reduced to a niche). yet, in their work they move beyond the contamination or hybridization of the meta-model of the book with the meta-model of the net (riva 299-304). in other words, they move beyond the metamodel of hyper-text, the cognitive translation of the intrinsic hyper-mobility of language, in order to venture into the uncharted territory of the hybrid, natural-artificial processing of language, which, supposedly, across our previous evolutionary stages, has made us human (all too human). in doing so, however, these artisans of the techno avant-garde maintain an organic link with the old repository of literary imagination: they experiment with the literary codes inherited from the past, especially the procedural algorithms of the historic avant-gardes, putting them to the test of the new instruments or devices – and in doing so, they claim a somewhat hybrid but progressive identity as writers. and here we come to the heart of my argument and my conclusions. in a book of a few years ago, arturo mazzarella spoke of the “great net of writing,” in praise of (literary) writing. it is true, he wrote, that within our cultural mode of production writing increasingly “hybridates” itself with video art, digital cinema, computer games, virtual communities, social networks etcetera. yet writing, according to mazzarella, maintains a fundamental power: “the capacity of going back to its origins: to the material pregnancy of the word, combined with the virtuality naturally imprinted in writing, whose indeterminacy assures its absolute plasticity” (mazzarella 118). i have italicized in this quotation the terms that i find both suggestive and highly problematic. the history of writing, as we know, hardly justifies a meta-physics of the origin: indeed, the latest forays into the origins of writing suggest a closer relationship between language and calculus than the traditional division of the two cultures was able to accept (grigorenko). as for the material pregnancy of the word, it is always embedded in, and dependant on, the specific tools and media in which the word finds concretization: there is nothing exclusively natural in it; it is an exquisitely technological device. and finally: of which indeterminacy does mazzarella exactly speak (write) here? a linguistic or a semantic one? is the plasticity to which he alludes the capacity of writing to break and renew its own rules and procedures? if so, is this humanist studies & the digital age massimo riva 2.1 fall 2012 96 plasticity a natural or a hybrid quality: isn’t the process of writing always embedded in a technological inter-mediation? and doesn’t the degree of plasticity precisely depend on this intermediation? moreover, we may ask whether this praise of the intrinsic plasticity, indeterminacy and fluidity of writing is sustainable from both a conceptual and a realistic point of view; or whether it should be simply considered an effect of the digital mode of production, a retrospective projection of properties that belong to the latter. i would argue the latter. perhaps, in our contemporary context, it does make more sense to speak of “liquid” or “fluid” writing than “solid” literature. yet, one must ask, is the price to be paid for the loss of an understandable notion of “literature”? fiorentino celebrates our newly acquired freedom to venture “diasporically” (thanks to the hyper-mobility of texts, once all canons are liquified) beyond our traditional institutional and territorial boundaries. it is limiting indeed to speak “only” of “literature” instead of “infinite nets,” understood as a new meta-cognitive model. if we accept this position, criticism will then become “a set of variously intertwined epistemological practices which trace knowledge paths in the cultural hyper-text” (fiorentino 59). my final question then is about the specific medium of this set of practices, distributed, pervasive, or interstitial within the cultural rhyzome. according to fiorentino, they consist in a “multitude of texts which are connective machines of diverse enunciations” (fiorentino, 58) – fiorentino also uses the term “script” and “score” (as in cinematic and musical writing). these definitions are certainly consistent, in principle, with the definition of “textual instruments,” mentioned above. the question is: what kind of writing are we talking about? are we sure that mazzarella, fiorentino, cayley, etc. mean the same thing when they talk about writing? isn’t our concept of writing, so “plastic,” so “liquid,” so “fluid” a little too cloudy or foggy, or fuzzy, if we do not specifically reflect (on) it from the point of view of the hybrid textual-algorithmic devices and the objects they produce, within the digital eco-system? in short, we have to consistently ask ourselves how writing is specifically mediated today, through our multiple programmable devices. what kind of interface is/processes literary writing, today, as a cultural software? (manovich) in order to answer this question we must begin by questioning the deceptively commonsense notion of an immaterial, entirely fluid textuality. perhaps, one effective way to examine this ideological fluidity the ideology of a free, unbound, anarchic circulation of textual currency – is to devise ways to interrupt the ever spinning, spiraling cycle of the hyper-textual machine. 2 how can literary (expressive) software interfere with the automatism of our self-programming cultural machine? how can it allow us to critically reflect, from both an emotional and cognitive standpoint (as is the prerogative of great works of literary art) on the way in which language transforms itself in its interaction with programmed devices? in the best possible cases, such a reflective approach (perhaps as an antidote to the widespread ludic enthusiasm for faster and faster computer gaming) can help us pose again, within our new cultural mode of being, the hermeneutical question: how can language (the being that can be understood) be understood, today? there is no work of digital literary art that expresses this dilemma better humanist studies & the digital age massimo riva 2.1 fall 2012 97 than noah fruin’s screen, 3 on which i conclude my book and this essay: in this full immersion experience, realized for the brown virtual reality environment, we are invited to read/listen to three stories, written in flickering characters on the walls of the cave, like the pages of a tridimensional book or a virtual version of the origins of writing, the latest version of the house of language. these stories are memories and as we try to read/evoke them, the characters start to peel off the walls. we can try to salvage them, pushing them back onto the walls by hitting them with a laser pointer, but this playful exercise becomes ever more frantic as the crumbling accelerates. until we give up and the words start to swirl faster and faster around us until they pile up or better condense together in an undecipherable white cloud in which we are immersed. as the voice speaking to us from the depth of the cave invites us to start “playing” again, to try and re-compose a meaning from the scattered, fragmentary words, the pieces of stories, of memories, of language slowly resurfacing on the walls, we have time to reflect that perhaps this painstaking task is (still) the paradoxical goal of the literary work in the age of programmable devices. 1 the definition can be found in a dialogue-interview with roger chartier at: http://www.carmencovito.com/archivio/saggi_regazzoni.html (web, august 16, 2012). 2 i refer to the international festival of digital arts “interrupt,” held at brown university in 2008. (http://www.brown.edu/project/interrupt_2008/) (june 25, 2012): “why “interrupt”? in computing, a hardware interrupt request or irq is used to prioritize the execution of certain processes over others. it is a command sent to the processor to get its attention, signaling the need to initiate a new operation. in the context of contemporary art, the act of interruption is a performance that redirects threads of process and lines of thought into fields of new expression. interrupts trigger the moment when a process of creation yields a public manifestation. the cycle of ongoing work is paused by a challenge, calling for the attention of a provisional community: just as we read icq as “i seek you,” we can read irq as “i argue.” in this sense, interrupts articulate critical thresholds at which formal expressions are offered up to (or forced into) new circuits of communication, countering that which came before and making a case for new artistic and political futures. 3 a short video of the installation is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wowf5kd5bv4 (june 28, 2012). works cited aarseth, erspen j. cybertext. perspectives on ergodic literature. baltimore, md: the johns hopkins university press, 1997. print. çoover, robert. “literary hypertext: the passing of the golden age.” digital arts and culture, atlanta, georgia, 1999. keynote address. web. 1 september 2012. http://nickm.com/vox/golden_age.html dilthey, wilhelm. selected works. volume i: introduction to the human sciences, princeton: princeton, u.p., 1991 print. http://www.carmencovito.com/archivio/saggi_regazzoni.html http://www.brown.edu/project/interrupt_2008/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wowf5kd5bv4 humanist studies & the digital age massimo riva 2.1 fall 2012 98 fiorentino, francesco, ed. al di là del testo. la critica letteraria e lo studio della cultura. macerata: quodlibet, 2011. print. fiormonte, domenico, ed. canoni liquidi. variazione culturale e stabilità testuale dalla bibbia a internet. napoli: scripta web, 2011. print. grigorenko, elena l, elisa mambrino, and david d. preiss. writing: a mosaic of new perspectives. hoboken: taylor &amp; francis, 2012. internet resource. hayles, n. katherine. “intermediation: the pursuit of a vision.” new literary history, volume 38, number 1, winter 2007: 99-125. print. ---, electronic literature: new horizons for the literary, notre dame: university of notre dame press, 2008. print. manovich, lev. “cultural software.” lev manovich new media, digital humanities, cultural analytics, software studies. web. june 25, 2012. http://manovich.net/2011/07/14/newarticle-cultural-software-lev-manoich-7142011/ mazzarella, arturo. la grande rete della scrittura. la letteratura dopo la rivoluzione digitale. torino: bollati boringhieri, 2008. print. nelson, theodor h. literary machines 93.1. sausalito ca: mindful press , 1992. print. ricciardi, mario, ed. oltre il testo, gli ipertesti. torino: bollati boringhieri, 1995. print. riva, massimo. il futuro della letteratura. l’opera d’arte letteraria nell’epoca della sua (ri)producibilità digitale. napoli: scripta web, 2011. print. wardrip-fruin, noah. expressive processing. digital fictions, computer games, and software studies. cambridge, mass.: mit press, 2011. print. ---, screen (2002-05) with sascha becker, josh carroll, robert coover, shawn greenlee, and andrew mcclain, http://www.hyperfiction.org/screen/. web. september 10, 2012. http://www.hyperfiction.org/screen/ humanist studies & the digital age, 3.1 (2013) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.3.1.3086 17 petrarch’s early manuscripts and incunabula in the oregon petrarch open book massimo lollini, university of oregon abstract. working from transcriptions generated through the t-pen program at st. louis university, the collaborators of the project “petrarch’s early manuscripts and incunabula in the oregon petrarch open book (opob)” are presently digitizing and encoding in tei p5 two key interpretative copies of petrarch’s rerum vulgarium fragmenta: the late fourteenth-century manuscript copy from the queriniana library in brescia, d ii 21, and the queriniana library’s copy of the first printed edition (editio princeps) of the rerum vulgarium fragmenta edited presumably by cristoforo [berardi?] and published by vindelin de speier (spira) in venice in 1470. the first part of the article traces a brief history of the oregon petrarch open book and the last section introduces a future project, “texts, images and interpretation in the opob.” the oregon petrarch open book the oregon petrarch open book (opob) is a working repository-hypertext in and around francis petrarch’s rerum vulgarium fragmenta, or collection of fragments in vernacular (also known as the canzoniere). the original title given by petrarch to his collection of poems literally translates fragments of scattered things in vernacular; it conveys the idea of an ongoing project that in taking shape and form maintains a fragmentary, uncertain, and open nature. using open source software, we are building a flexible and comprehensive structure of digital assets that promotes innovative research, preservation, and pedagogy, based on international collaboration among scholars and institutions, and continues petrarch’s model of an open, evolving, and unfinished work. this project started in 2003 with the goal of deepening our understanding of the future of the book in the context of digital scholarship. it was seen as a critical opportunity to integrate different technologies and resources stretching from manuscript, to book culture, up to late print culture. since its inception, the project has been particularly interested in taking advantage of digital technology http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ humanist studies & the digital age lollini 3.1 spring 2013 18 to create new conditions to study and teach petrarch’s rerum vulgarium fragmenta (henceforth, rvf) through its evolution and afterlife in translations, rewritings, and intersemiotic transpositions. the open book idea presents this central work of world literature as an ongoing project, not as a finished product. thus, the opob shares the idea that digital technology favors a movement “away from the notion of a single-text ‘definitive edition’” (finneran). the project aims to provide multiple versions of the rvf in different formats, being aware that a special concern with versioning is a distinctive feature of contemporary editing (bryant). the canzoniere is the perfect text for designing a system around the idea of the open book. not only is it the most influential collection of poetry in the european tradition, but it is constructively and profitably read as a work-inprogress and as an unfinished text; petrarch continued to produce different versions of his collection and shift the order of the poems until his death in 1374. roland greene sees in petrarch’s canzoniere the founding moment of western lyric sequence that influenced the lyrical discourse not only of european poets but also of north american and latin american poets such as walt whitman and pablo neruda. it is not by chance that an important digital humanities project such as “the whitman archive” has encountered problems similar to those that the opob is facing: representing the unfinished and evolving nature of whitman’s leaves of grass, which like the rvf may be read as a work-in-progress, an unfinished text that, in the context of nineteenth-century print culture, underwent continual addition, revision, and reordering throughout the poet’s life. in 2010 the opob received a digital humanities start-up level ii fellowship. this grant triggered collaboration with web designer travis shea and the university of oregon libraries, making available new versions of petrarch’s rvf in digital format, from the diplomatic edition prepared by ettore modigliani in 1904 – a transcription of the manuscript vatican latin 3195, on which petrarch was still working at the time of his death – to the most recent critical edition prepared by giuseppe savoca (2008). other important resources have been included, such as alessandro vellutello’s 1525 commentary of the rvf and the complete 1555 french translation by vasquin philieul. finally, the opob was able to develop an international collaboration, involving among others ennio ferraglio, director of the queriniana italian library in brescia, who gave to the project permission to use digital copies of one important early manuscript of the rvf (codex queriniano d ii 21) and the earliest incunabulum of the rvf (queriniano g v 15) from the library. we also worked with peter kuon (university of salzburg), paola vecchi galli (university of bologna) and, for a short period, wayne storey (indiana university). humanist studies & the digital age lollini 3.1 spring 2013 19 during the neh grant period, we enhanced the functionality of the existing database software and of specific tools, such as “compare poems and assets,” by providing multiple moveable containers of selectable content, text, images, audio or video. the opob encourages an active and polyphonic reading; allowing different platforms of critical attention by using the link compare poems and assets in the upper right of the screen: the user may compare multiple versions of the original text in italian, for example the modigliani diplomatic edition and the recent critical edition prepared by giuseppe savoca: http://petrarch.uoregon.edu/users/maxiloll#overlay=multi-compare http://petrarch.uoregon.edu/users/maxiloll#overlay=multi-compare humanist studies & the digital age lollini 3.1 spring 2013 20 the user may choose one of the texts of the rvf and then add elements of the apparatus to compare different translations: or to consult paraphrases, summaries and tweets: humanist studies & the digital age lollini 3.1 spring 2013 21 one can access an important commentary, vellutello’s le volgari opere del petrarcha con l'esposizione di alessandro vellutello (1525): or see archives (visual, audio, and textual) related to specific poems: humanist studies & the digital age lollini 3.1 spring 2013 22 the digital humanities start-up level ii grant was instrumental in supporting an upgrade to the website infrastructure using the latest version (7) of the open source content management system, drupal. thanks to the collaboration of karen estlund, head of the digital scholarship center at the university of oregon, we were able to link the opob site to the uo libraries’ digital repository: https://oregondigital.org/cdm4/browse.php?cisoroot=/petrarch tools were applied to the text images included in the repository that allow the user to zoom and pan around within a window in order to make comparisons to other content more accessible. the texts of the library repository are now linked to the opob and at the same time have been made available for anyone to access and use for research. the metadata is also available via the open archives initiative protocol for metadata harvesting, making the texts available to be re-used in other projects. the new site of the opob was officially made available to the public at the end of october 2011. we call opob the open-book initiative, partly in homage to the open-source software movement whose tools we are using (drupal, php, mysql, xtf, shared-canvas), and partly in reference to the way computer-mediated communication technology and online professional networking has opened up new ways of building academic communities to learn and collaborate. but mostly we call it “open” because our approach articulates new interdisciplinary paths for reading and learning in the romance languages and literatures, comparative literature, linguistics, and translation studies. given the importance of petrarch’s canzoniere in the formation of modern western lyric discourse, only a richly annotated hypertextual approach can do justice to the https://oregondigital.org/cdm4/browse.php?cisoroot=/petrarch humanist studies & the digital age lollini 3.1 spring 2013 23 complexity and richness of the cross-cultural and interlingual connections involved in the phenomenon of petrarchism. as mentioned above, the new site includes the most recent critical edition of petrarch’s canzoniere prepared by giuseppe savoca. this edition is different from all previous editions and arguably the most innovative in its editorial decisions, made possible by the use of digital technology and ultraviolet analysis. most innovations are related to punctuation. for instance, the interpretation of sonnet 179 changes in the new edition because of a virgula at the end of a verse. preparation of the edition involved approaching the canzoniere with a view to establishing concordances/correlations among all aspects of its “lexicon” (literally lexical, graphemic, and visual). savoca holds that his use of computer technology, both on the lexical level and in the treatment of images, made the difference with respect to the traditional philological approach, both in analysis and in the properly editorial phase. proceeding by concordance/correlation implies that, before making any editorial decision, one must compare all analogous elements of the work and be aware of the received philological tradition. savoca is convinced that today only computational analysis can provide a scientific basis for our textual analyses. digital treatment of a text, he writes, allows us to move from the syntagm to the paradigm; that is, it puts us in contact with the system specific to the text that we wish to understand and publish. nonetheless, savoca is aware that “the philology of a text is a continuously open technical and cognitive process” and that, as a consequence, the hermeneutic task of the interpreter is inexhaustible and should always be philologically oriented (vii). philology is the master key of the opob that takes us one step further toward the computer-assisted reconstruction of the text envisioned by savoca. this is done through the creation of a hypertext that aims at documenting the historical evolution of the canzoniere from manuscript culture to print and digital culture. from this perspective, all editions of the canzoniere previous to savoca’s maintain their value and utility as a witness to the multiple lives of the text and its reception and translations. for this reason, we decided to keep in our hypertext the previous critical edition prepared by contini. in the opob it is possible to switch from one edition to the other using the following, drop-down menu: humanist studies & the digital age lollini 3.1 spring 2013 24 transcribing and encoding codex queriniano d ii 21 and incunabulum queriniano g v 15 having built a solid infrastructure and productive collaborative ties with local, national, and international colleagues, the opob decided to pursue further collaborative exchange and interoperability by implementing tei (text encoding initiative) encoding in key digital assets of the opob. in fact, the tei has become an essential component of e-philology, not only by developing an interchange language that allows scholars to exchange information but also by developing a new data description language that improves the ability to describe textual features. in 2012 we received an american council of learned societies digital innovation grant (acls) for the collaborative project “petrarch’s early manuscripts and incunabula in the oregon petrarch open book.” this project is an open source, open access initiative designed for students, scholars, teachers, and translators to read and investigate selected manuscripts and early printed editions of petrarch’s magnum opus that have been instrumental to its interpretation from its first release in 1362 until today. working from transcriptions generated through the t-pen program at st. louis university (transcription for paleographical and editorial notation), the collaborators of the project are presently digitizing and encoding in tei p5 two key interpretative copies of petrarch’s rvf: the late fourteenth-century manuscript copy from the queriniana library in brescia, d ii 21, and the queriniana library’s copy of the first printed edition (editio princeps) of the rvf edited by cristoforo [berardi?] and published by vindelin de speier (spira) in venice in 1470. the encoding of the transcriptions utilizes standard tei p5 modules to produce schemas in dtd, w3c, and relax ng formats. additional validation will be performed by a schematron schema. massimo lollini is leading the transcription, encoding, and testing processes; his team include as collaborators and consultants: 1) karen estlund, head, digital scholarship center, uo libraries; humanist studies & the digital age lollini 3.1 spring 2013 25 2) john russell, scholarly communications librarian, uo libraries; 3) giuseppe savoca, professor of modern and contemporary italian literature at the university of catania; and 4) laura mandell, department of english, texas a&m. finally, jeremy echols is at the moment our web developer and cinzia capon is helping with transcriptions and encoding. the encoding process and critical collaborative work by lollini and his team will enhance enormously the functionality and readability of the rvf in the context of the opob by making available crucial documents of the interpretative tradition of the text, as well as its cultural and historical development and reception. in our view, the work done for the 2012 acls grant advances, on the one hand, the core idea of our hypertext approach, and, on the other hand, the interpretative challenges of our research. it also provides other scholars and students with the necessary basic tools for discovering new interpretative paths in the documents and data we are making available. after terminating transcription and encoding, the link manuscripts in the opob will include the codex queriniano d ii 21. this manuscript is one of the least studied of the early petrarchan “documents” of the rvf and one of the most revealing. it is a fair copy in an accurate hand that follows the graphological matrices inherent in petrarch’s own manuscripts (vatican latino 3195 and 3196): sonnets are copied two verses per line across the page in a twocolumn format, as are canzoni, ballate, and madrigals. humanist studies & the digital age lollini 3.1 spring 2013 26 the following image shows how this manuscript is transcribed using t-pen software: the link incunabula in the opob will include the above mentioned editio princeps of the canzoniere. while most copies of this first printed edition are known for their uniquely sparse visual presentation, without commentary or other paratextual features, the queriniana copy of the editio princeps is famous for its extensive illustrations that serve as elaborate glosses of fundamental natural motifs in the poems. humanist studies & the digital age lollini 3.1 spring 2013 27 the transcription of the incunabulum is particularly complex as it includes marginal glosses and illustrative vignettes for each poem. the following images show the transcribing procedure of the text: and for the handwritten glosses: the extensive code written to transcribe the few lines of the gloss gives an idea of the complexity of the operation. finally, the following screenshot gives an idea of the procedure we are following to encode and describe the miniatures associated to the glosses: humanist studies & the digital age lollini 3.1 spring 2013 28 the future: preservation, encoding, and interpretation digital technology is instrumental for taking critical advantage of previous technologies through a process of remediation of the texts we inherited from the past. we are aware of the humanist root of modern philology that came to life along with the technology of the book. one could even argue that the textual fluidity theorized for example by john bryant, which is often discussed in current debates on digital humanities, was already perceived by early humanists. however, bryant follows derrida’s disregard of “nostalgia for origins” and of the idea of a truth free from “free-play.” bryant and derrida suggest that the freeplay of the fluid text leads to a transcendence beyond “man and humanism” and point out the need for new ways of reading, interpreting, and teaching, favoring a mode of interpretation that de-centers meaning and is happy with given and existing fragments of signification (10). the opob takes into consideration the basic fluidity of texts as it has been identified by modern criticism as the first step of digital philology. moreover, our project addresses some fundamental pitfalls of humanist philology: the tendency to limit the philological operation to a purely restorative and conservative task, or to a dialogue among authors. nonetheless, we do not emphasize the free-play of fragments of signification but hypertextual construction of meaning, the hermeneutical value of texts through editing, marking up, collating, drawing on phenomenological, comparative, hermeneutic procedures, and moving beyond a deterministic idea of text as a pure fact. we believe in a philologically oriented and creative idea of criticism, intrinsically hermeneutic and based on a relational rather than ontological notion of meaning. this is a humanist idea, hermeneutical, perspectival, and finite. as we move toward the encoding of manuscripts and early books written six centuries ago, we are conscious that a restorative approach is certainly a key factor in the responsibility that the digital humanities have in the preservation of the memory humanist studies & the digital age lollini 3.1 spring 2013 29 of the past. jerome mcgann has insisted on this point, arguing “for the philologian, materials are preserved because their simple existence testifies that they once had value.” we share this view, as our present work of transcribing and encoding codex queriniano d ii 21 and incunabulum queriniano g v 15 testifies. our aim is first of all to preserve a written and digital memory of these important documents of the petrarchan tradition as they are, by transcribing and making note of all possible details, even those that we do not understand. nonetheless, a purely conservative approach is not sufficient to address all the problems involved in the preservation of the memory of our humanist culture. that approach would miss the great opportunity that digital humanists have to re-think the very notion of humanism made possible by the advent of digital technology. from this comes the need to associate the preserving and restorative activity to an interpretative one. this argument is developed and addressed in the editorial to the present issue of humanist studies & the digital age. on the one hand, we know that the “computational notion of the text as a type of data does not coincide with the notion of the text as a product of literary activity” and that the pure “markup thus belongs not to the world of formalisms but to the world of representations”. in other words we know that “markup is not a data model” but a “type of data representation,” (buzzetti 67) partial and limited as any type of representation and interpretation. however, besides constraining us within their intrinsic limits, digital philology and textual encoding initiatives provide us with the challenging and stimulating opportunity to re-read and re-interpret the masterpieces of the past from the point of view of a new technology and the new questions we are facing. the opob is willing to take on this challenge by elaborating a project entitled “texts, images, and interpretation in the opob.” building on the achievements of the acls grant, the new project will allow us to enhance the innovative and humanistic value of the opob. developing and substantiating the philosophical idea of a “more than human humanism,” this new interpretative textual annotation will focus in particular on all the geographical and natural references of petrarch’s canzoniere. moreover, it will be complemented by the semantic elaboration of the already encoded images of the incunabulum queriniano. using open access and semantic web tools, we will include in our repository-hypertext a digital collection of images from the incunabulum. the images will be linked to the textual thematic network encoded to add an important iconographic element to the interactive net of relationships. we are inspired, in part, by recent developments in the new discipline called ethnophilology that is working to reinstate at the center of the philological humanist studies & the digital age lollini 3.1 spring 2013 30 task the need to study the manuscripts not exclusively from an authorial perspective but as a witness to the forms of civilizations that produced them. from this viewpoint, the author and the text need to be studied in a broader context that includes not only the historical, cultural environment but also the natural one. this is particularly true for a poet like petrarch who had an intense rapport with nature throughout his entire life. our project will show how the sources of his poetry are not only the manuscripts and books from the cultural past but also his profound dialogue with nature that accompanied his love relationship with laura and triggered his metaphysical speculations. this project “texts, images, and interpretation in the opob” will inaugurate the most innovative phase of the opob and provide the opportunity to validate its original approach to hypertext web publishing. in particular, interpretative encoding and annotation, in conjunction with enhancement of the semantic encoding that links text and images will implement the core idea of the hypertext that we are building in and around the rvf. this effort will create a collection of textualities broadly conceived to include intersemiotic transpositions that show the evolution of petrarch’s work from manuscript to print and digital culture. the result will be a growing and living archive in which discrete units, entities, and systems are codependent and make sense only in relation to one another. these fragments are witnesses not only to a dialogue among authors and texts but also to a way of inhabiting the world and becoming human in relation to a more than the human environment. works cited benozzo, francesco. etnofilologia: un'introduzione. napoli: liguori, 2010. print. bryant, john. the fluid text: a theory of revision and editing for book and screen. ann arbor: university of michigan press. 2002. print. buzzetti, dino. “digital representation and the text model.” new literary history. 33 (2002): 61–88. print. finneran, richard j. the literary text in the digital age. ann arbor: university of michigan press. 1996. print. humanist studies & the digital age lollini 3.1 spring 2013 31 greene, roland. post-petrarchism: origins and innovations of the western lyric sequence. princeton, princeton university press. 1991. print. mcgann, jerome. “memory now.” 4humanities. web. 2/02/2013. <http://4humanities.org/2012/08/jerome-j-mcgann-memory-now-2/> lollini, massimo. “return to philology and hypertext in and around petrarch’s rvf.” humanist studies & the digital age. 1.1 (2011). web. 15 sep. 2011. <http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/article/view/1101>. petrarca, francesco. canzoniere; trionfi. cur. cristoforo [berardi?]. venezia: vindelino da spira, 1470. incunabulum queriniano g v 15. queriniana library, brescia. print. ------. canzoniere. codex queriniano d ii 21, queriniana library, brescia. print. petrarca, francesco, gianfranco contini, and daniele ponchiroli. canzoniere. torino: g. einaudi, 1964. print. petrarca, francesco, and giuseppe savoca. rerum vulgarium fragmenta. firenze: l.s. olschki, 2008. print. http://4humanities.org/2012/08/jerome-j-mcgann-memory-now-2/ humanist studies & the digital age, 3.1 (2013) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.3.1.3166 60 premessa all’edizione cinese del discorso sulla dignità umana di pico della mirandola pier cesare bori, univerity of bologna abstract: this essay was written as introduction to the chinese translation of pico della mirandola’s discourse on the dignity of man (1486), which is considered the “manifesto of the renaissance.” the discourse deals with the vocation of the human creature that, possessing no determinate image, is urged to pursue its own perfection. such a pursuit begins with moral self-discipline, passes through the familiar, multifarious world of images and fields of knowledge, and strives toward that most lofty goal which defies representation. pico believes that this paradigm, by virtue of the fact that it is to be found in every tradition, is universal. the discourse merits attention today precisely on account of its affirmation that human nature, which is in itself indeterminate and weak, comes alive and obtains its identity through the plurality of human cultures, each representing customs that, though distinct, are (in their essence, structure and function) essentially identical. hence the possibility of harmony and grounds for "peace" among cultures. 1. il discorso sulla dignità umana di pico della mirandola (1463-1494), scritto nel 1486, è considerato il “manifesto del rinascimento”. le immagini, i colori, i suoni del rinascimento sono famosi in tutto il mondo. meno conosciuto tuttavia, al di là degli stereotipi, è questo piccolo capolavoro letterario, che costituisce invece di uno strumento prezioso per penetrare nella mente umanistica. questo testo infatti indipendentemente dalla sua origine occasionale (era stato scritto in vista di un evento, la discussione delle novecento tesi di pico in un’assemblea romana, che non si riunì mai) rappresenta con incomparabile efficacia lo sfondo intellettuale del rinascimento: l’umanesimo, con la sua fiducia appunto nella natura umana e la sua apertura a differenti discipline, culture, filosofie, religioni. breve fu la vita di pico, e la sua creatività si espresse nell’arco di brevissimi anni, anzi mesi. e tutta questa stagione straordinaria sarebbe durata poco: gli eventi della riforma e della controriforma avrebbero cambiato definitamente il volto dell’europa. ma l’umanesimo avrebbe comunque segnato http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ humanist studies & the digital age bori 3.1 spring 2013 61 tutta la storia successiva. perfino l’impresa di matteo ricci (un secolo dopo, ma quanta differenza da pico) non sarebbe stata possibile senza la passione filologica e lo slancio universalistico che avevano preso impulso da cusano, marsilio, pico, erasmo. 2. giovanni pico della mirandola nacque il 24 febbraio 1463 nel castello di mirandola, dei conti di mirandola e concordia. la madre, giulia boiardo, consapevole dei talenti straordinari del precoce giovanni, lo volle sottrarre al “mestiere delle armi” comune alla famiglia e alle contese che dividevano i due fratelli galeotto e anton maria, e lo volle avviare agli studi ecclesiastici. recatosi prima a bologna, a quattordici anni, per studiare diritto, morta la madre nell’agosto del 1478, andava a ferrara nel maggio del 1479 per studiarvi filosofia. qui conosceva anche girolamo savonarola e nasceva un rapporto di reciproca stima. a ferrara coltivò gli “studia humanitatis” con battista guarini, e apprese il greco. nell’ottobre del 1480 si trasferiva a padova, dove approfondiva la conoscenza di aristotele e dell’averroismo e veniva introdotto anche alla conoscenza della cabala ebraica dal filosofo aristotelico elia del medigo. dopo l’estate del 1482 si recò a pavia, dove si arricchiva con la conoscenza della logica. nel frattempo maturava il suo incontro con l’umanesimo fiorentino, a partire dall’amicizia con angelo poliziano, iniziata in un momento in cui pico coltivava un interesse verso la produzione poetica. incontrava naturalmente anche con il grande marsilio ficino. rinunciando all’eredità e risolvendo ogni problema economico con i fratelli, pico si ritrovò con grandi risorse economiche e libero di perseguire i suoi interessi intellettuali. a firenze coltivava l’amicizia del poliziano, di ficino di girolamo benivieni, di lorenzo de’ medici. qui ad elia del medigo, per la conoscenza delle cose ebraiche, si affiancò guglielmo raimondi di moncada, ovvero flavio mitridate, ebreo di origine, personaggio complesso e difficile, ma validissimo traduttore. con un soggiorno a parigi, alla sorbona, tra il luglio del 1485 e l’inizio dell’anno successivo, si completava una formazione che aveva consentito a pico, più di ogni altro intellettuale nel suo tempo, la conoscenza delle più importanti correnti culturali e dei protagonisti più significativi della cultura europea. 3. il 1486 fu per il giovane pico della mirandola un anno straordinario. nel marzo, a 23 anni, tornò da parigi a firenze, tra i suoi amici lorenzo de’ medici, poliziano, marsilio ficino. l'otto maggio partì per roma. due giorni dopo ad arezzo tentava senza successo di rapire margherita, moglie di giuliano de’ medici, causando molto scandalo. riparatosi a fratta, tra perugia e todi, si apriva per lui un periodo di nascondimento eccezionalmente fecondo. dopo alcuni mesi di silenzio, a partire dal settembre dello stesso anno, la corrispondenza ricomincia a ridarci notizia di lui. tre lettere di quel periodo sono importanti, anche per la comprensione del suo discorso. humanist studies & the digital age bori 3.1 spring 2013 62 anzitutto pico scriveva a marsilio ficino parlandogli con entusiasmo dei suoi studi linguistici, dei sapienti caldei, del suo amore per plotino. si può pensare che risalga a questo periodo la prima, parziale redazione (testimoniata dal codice palatino 885), del discorso e che risalga anche, insieme a questo, il disegno di un convegno a roma. si sarebbe trattato di un ampio consesso di teologi, filosofi, personalità della chiesa, in cui pico avrebbe riscattato il suo onore e si sarebbe ricoperto di gloria proponendo alla discussione un insieme di novecento proposizioni (tesi) in cui si avrebbe compendiato il sapere del suo tempo. il discorso sarebbe stato allora l’introduzione alla disputa romana. il 15 ottobre, scriveva ad andrea corneo una lunga lettera. parlava dei fatti del maggio precedente. si doleva di aver peccato, non si difendeva. altri avrebbero voluto scusarlo di quello di cui egli non si scusava affatto. ma difendeva la vocazione intellettuale e filosofica, anche nella sua funzione sociale. infine il 10 novembre informava un ignoto amico che le sue tesi sono cresciute sino a 900. al discorso si aggiungeva un’ultima sezione ispirata al testo evangelico: “vi do la mia pace, vi do la mia pace, vi lascio la pace” (gv 14,27-31a). pico sentiva con commozione che la sua impresa avrebbe potuto contribuire alla pacificazione di un mondo diviso. entusiasmo ermeneutico, impresa filosofico-teologica (senza opposizione tra le due discipline), al servizio della pace interiore ed esterna: questi allora sono i temi originari di questo testo, elaborato in solitudine. a questi venne ad aggiungersi, forse quando pico era già a roma, un quarto tema: la difesa della propria impresa contro le obiezioni e le accuse che pico prevedeva certo ci sarebbero state, ma certo non così aspre e distruttive. 4. si recava dunque a roma dove, il 7 dicembre le tesi venivano pubblicate. le reazioni furono deludenti. papa innocenzo viii all’inizio del 1487 vietò la pubblica discussione. il 29 febbraio 1487 venne nominata una commissione di vescovi, teologi, religiosi che si riunì tra il 2 e il 13 marzo. pico partecipò alle sedute, ma solo per cinque giorni. sette sue tesi vennero condannate, altre sei censurate. nella primavera del 1487 pico preparò rapidamente una apologia e la pubblicò (il discorso apparve invece solo nel 1496, dopo la sua morte pubblicato dal nipote giovanfrancesco insieme ad altri scritti). attaccato e condannato per alcune sue tesi, pico rispose con la sua apologia. il testo è importante, perché pico vi si difende distinguendo diversi livelli di certezza. un conto è il credo: gli articoli di fede derivati direttamente dalla bibbia e dai primi quattro concili e anche (su un gradino inferiore) le formulazioni dogmatiche dei concili successivi, e un conto sono le opinioni dei padri della chiesa e della teologia. le opinioni possono essere vere, false, probabili, verosimili, ma contrastarle non è eretico. altro è la fede, altro è l’opinione. rinviato all’inquisizione, il 31 luglio sottoscrisse un atto di sottomissione humanist studies & the digital age bori 3.1 spring 2013 63 all’autorità ecclesiastica. le tesi dovevano essere bruciate. offeso, amareggiato, pico abbandonò roma e si recò in francia; nel viaggio venne arrestato e scortato a parigi. protetto dal re, accolto a vincennes, poté ritornare a firenze nell’aprile del 1488. alessandro vi lo riconcilierà presto con la chiesa cattolica e cancellerà la sua condanna. gli ultimi anni di pico furono segnati da una produzione intensa ma anche da un certo ritorno a posizioni meno originali. nell’estate del 1489 godendo di un felice raccoglimento a fiesole, attese a un commento ai salmi e al primo capitolo della genesi. scriveva nello stesso periodo il sull’ente e sull’uno, dedicato ad angelo poliziano, che avrebbe circolato manoscritto, frammento di una grande opera che avrebbe dovuto dimostrare la “concordia” di aristotele con platone. attendeva anche ad un’opera assai vasta, le dispute contro l’astrologia divinatrice, che sarà pubblicata, incompleta, dal nipote nel 1496. pico vi distingue tra astronomia e astrologia, contestando la validità di quest’ultima, contro la voga del tempo, favorita anche da altri studiosi come marsilio ficino. giovanni pico morì dopo breve malattia, per una febbre, il 17 novembre 1494, assistito fra gli altri da fra’ girolamo savonarola, cui era stato molto vicino, negli ultimi anni della sua breve vita. 5. la figura di pico, sin dalla sua morte prematura, non ha cessato di affascinare la fantasia popolare, e di attirare l’attenzione degli studiosi. negli ultimi decenni si sono tenuti importanti convegni, nuove edizioni e traduzioni delle sue opere sono apparse, le sue fonti sono state indagate in profondità. in tutto questo fermento, permane tuttavia, ormai da decenni, la divaricazione fra due atteggiamenti interpretativi intorno a pico. la tendenza dominante dell'interpretazione pichiana – da jacob burckhardt, con la sua classica opera sul rinascimento in italia, attraverso giovanni gentile, eugenio garin (il maggior studioso di pico), ernst cassirer, paul oskar kristeller, sino agli ultimi contributi sulla cultura magica, astrologica, esoterica, cabbalistica, sincretistica di pico – la tendenza dominante insiste su pico come innovatore, rappresentante eminente della modernità, con il suo individualismo e la sua esaltazione della libertà. un'altra tendenza vede in pico e nel suo discorso la continuità con la tradizione teologica, dalla bibbia, ai padri, alla teologia scolastica. fra i rappresentanti di questa tendenza, henri de lubac si distingue per il genuino pathos e per l'alto grado di erudizione (e fra gli altri, eccelle il lavoro di di napoli). gli anni più recenti hanno visto aumentare contributi molto importanti dedicati allo studio e edizione delle singole opere, fra cui la fondamentale edizione curata da francesco bausi, e quella che ho curato con francesco borghesi, michael papio e massimo riva per la cambridge university press. gli studi ebraici e islamici di pico sono più noti e indagati. humanist studies & the digital age bori 3.1 spring 2013 64 6. per nostra parte, la conoscenza di pico si inserisce in una ricerca in cui abbiamo sempre privilegiato gli esponenti di una ricerca religiosa certo, ma universalistica e pluralistica. così è stato all’inizio del pico-project con la brown university nel 1997 (con massimo riva, mike papio, saverio marchignoli, dino buzzetti, francesco borghesi e altri). la premessa tuttora leggibile in rete diceva: il discorso sulla dignità dell'uomo di pico della mirandola (1463-1494) è considerato il manifesto del rinascimento. scritto nel 1486, contiene infatti l'esaltazione della creatura umana, come creatura libera e capace di conoscere e dominare la realtà intera. ancor più di questo però il discorso parla del compito della creatura umana: questa, priva di immagine predeterminata, deve perseguire la propria compiutezza con un percorso che muove dall'autodisciplina morale, attraversa la pluralità delle immagini e dei saperi, e tende alla meta più alta, non rappresentabile. pico della mirandola ritiene che questo paradigma di sviluppo dell'esistenza sia universale, perché rintracciabile in tutte le tradizioni. l'interesse attuale del discorso è proprio nella sua affermazione che la natura umana, indeterminata e debole di per sé, si realizza e si identifica attraverso la realtà molteplice delle culture umane: ogni cultura costituisce una via diversa, ma nella sua essenza, funzione e struttura, identica. di qui anche la possibilità della concordia e il fondamento della pace, tra le culture. (progetto pico/ pico project) 7. in un contributo più organico, alcuni anni fa, dal titolo già significativo, “pluralità delle vie,” approfondivo le principali chiavi di lettura: anzitutto la difesa della libera vocazione intellettuale e la fiducia ermeneutica, che sostiene pico nell’affrontare si può dire per la prima volta insieme letterature e mondi tanto diversi; e quindi la coraggiosa apertura del canone anche di là della bibbia (ma mai contro di essa) alla ricerca delle fonti di una “filosofia perenne.” in terzo luogo il bilinguismo, per cui pico può parlare della stessa esperienza spirituale in termini biblici (per lui non rinunciabili) e in termini platonici, o comunque filosofici. di qui la pluralità delle vie, che attraverso un modello tripartito di evoluzione morale, intellettuale, spirituale, conducono comunque tutte ad un esito unitario; e infine quel che si può dire la via della bellezza, la “teologia poetica” che gli consente di affermare che in ogni scuola c’è qualcosa di “insigne” (riprendendo cicerone), e di articolare il discorso secondo i diversi autori e di apprezzare lo stile di ogni autore. 8. volendo andar ancor oltre si potrebbe tentare di riassumere le premesse su cui si basa la visione di pico, per quel che possiamo ricostruire dalla frammentarietà dei suoi scritti (com’è noto, le tesi sono pure enunciazioni, prive del corpo argomentativo). anzitutto il paradigma genealogico e l’unità iniziale del humanist studies & the digital age bori 3.1 spring 2013 65 sapere umano. alla base sta certamente marsilio ficino, che con il suo straordinario lavoro, anzitutto di traduzione, volto alla valorizzazione degli antichi misteri e della primitiva teologia, aveva preparato il terreno a pico. nel discorso (soprattutto nella prima redazione) e nelle sue tesi pico sembra adombrare una genealogia originale, in cui i “caldei”, hanno un ruolo fondamentale, perché connessi a zoroastro. parallelamente c’è la fonte ebraica, meglio rappresenta dalla cabbala, che pico rivendica il merito di avere per primo valorizzato. si vuol suggerire che, via via che si retrocede verso la sapienza antica, ci si avvicina ad una filosofia perenne che contiene in sé i fondamenti di un’unità di pensiero smarrita nel corso della storia del pensiero umano. le fasi più antiche di questa filosofia sono avvolte da un linguaggio simbolico e poetico, una “teologia poetica”; ma pico crede di poter mostrare le corrispondenze che vi sono tra le diverse formulazioni di questo pensiero: soprattutto zoroastrismo e cabbala, poi sapienza egizia e orfica. in secondo luogo la com-presenza degli esseri. al di là della dimostrazione della convergenza verso le origini comuni, pico propone, al centro delle sue tesi, un fondamento filosofico originale della concordia tra le divergenti scuole di pensiero. si tratta delle “settantuno tesi paradossali secondo la propria opinione, introducenti nuove dottrine nella filosofia”: è la sua “nuova filosofia.” per quel che possiamo comprendere, l’autore concepisce e propone diversi stati o livelli dell’essere, l’ultimo o primo di questi è quel che chiama essere “uniale”, che stabilisce la fondamentale correlazione tra tutti gli esseri. il principio fondamentale è che sebbene, come è tradizione teologica, le gerarchie divine siano distinte, si deve tuttavia intendere che tutto è in tutto a suo modo. il riferimento a nicola da cusa viene spontaneo, ma non è certo. sicuramente la formula “tutto in tutto” è di antica ascendenza. steve farmer ne indica l’origine nel neoplatonismo, rispondendo questo principio a quel che farmer ritiene esigenze sincretistiche. pico tuttavia fa uso di questo principio dell’unicità ultima del reale sul piano dell’ermeneutica teologica e sul piano metafisico con tale coerenza teoretica di rendere ingiustificata l’accusa di sincretismo. il progetto di concordia filosofica nel senso più vasto, quale era stato quello delle tesi, troverebbe qui, secondo questa lettura, una giustificazione più profonda che nel paradigma dell’analogia e della partecipazione, dell’emanazione e della gerarchia degli esseri, in cui l’unità essenzialistica dell’essere è acquisita attraverso una dialettica intellettualistica. nasce di qui quella intertestualità che si può dire infinita, della quale si è già detto, ma anche anche l’intuizione di una possibilità di intervenire sulla natura in forza del legame che unisce tutti gli esseri (“simpatia” universale) e grazie conoscenza delle leggi che governano la natura: il motto di francesco bacone, secondo cui l’uomo non comanda alla natura se non obbedendole, compare già nel discorso. il contesto è quello, tipicamente rinascimentale, della humanist studies & the digital age bori 3.1 spring 2013 66 rivalutazione della “magia” come espressione dell’antico sapere originario, ma è corretto riconoscere qui una tensione verso un sapere che diventi anche tecnica al servizio dell’uomo. infine, l’unità escatologica, personale e comune. l’impossibilità di definire l’immagine divina getta luce sulla prima pagina del discorso: anche l’uomo è “privo di immagine definita.” il destino, individuale e comune dell’umanità, è nel ritorno all’unità con un assoluto del quale solo “il silenzio è lode”. in un passo del breve trattato “sull’ente e sull’uno” (cap. 5), a proposito dell’oscurità in cui dio abita, pico cita un passo straordinario di dionigi areopagita (teologia mistica 5) che così parla della divinità: “ non è verità, né regno, né sapienza, né uno, né unità, né divinità, né bontà, né spirito...nella divinità non c’è nessun discorso, né nome, né scienza, né tenebre, né luce, né errore, né verità, né è possibile di lei alcuna affermazione o negazione alcuna” (dyonisius, de mystica theologia 149-150). le premesse storiche per la tesi pichiane sulla genealogia della sapienza erano troppo deboli. l’amore per il linguaggio non significa per lui la stessa cosa che per il filologo lorenzo valla. le connessioni intertestuali di pico sono ancora fragilmente sorrette dall’allegorismo dell’antica esegesi. il fascino dell’esoterico e del magico impregna in maniera per noi fastidiosa le ultime pagine. la cultura retorica e il latino umanistico rendono pico perfino più difficile a leggersi che la stessa scolastica medievale. e tuttavia è importante cogliere anche quanto di teoreticamente rilevante – moderno? attuale? (si possono ancora usare questi aggettivi in questa età posthegeliana e post-storicista?) – c’è nella pagine di pico: pensiamo al tema dell’ “età assiale,” proposto da karl jaspers e tuttora accolto dalla ricerca. pensiamo a leibniz, che oggi ottiene sempre maggiore attenzione. pensiamo al superamento dell’opposizione tra sapere filosofico sapere religioso, recentemente invocato da j. habermas. pensiamo, a proposito della compresenza degli esseri, a quell’ “unicità dell’esistenza” che la filosofia religiosa araba medievale proponeva e che un grande comparatista, toshiko izutsu (sufism and taoism) vedeva come anche come terreno comune delle grandi tradizioni. 9. ed ecco l’edizione cinese, frutto di un’esperienza di lavoro in comune già come tale, crediamo, molto interessante e potenzialmente aperta ad altri risultati. le considerazioni che precedono potranno interessare anche il lettore in cina, crediamo, non siamo, come si sarà compreso, tra i sostenitori di invalicabili differenze tra le culture, tanto meno di inevitabili conflitti. ma in particolare potrà interessare questo lettore, come già si accennava, di incontrare, nel momento della sua formazione, quella cultura umanistica che avrebbe reso possibile il più positivo scambio tra cultura europea e quella cinese, con matteo ricci e gli altri compagni. humanist studies & the digital age bori 3.1 spring 2013 67 più in generale, se si considera che la cultura confuciana presenta lo stesso tratto fondamentale: “io tramando, non fabbrico: stimo e amo gli antichi” (lun yü, vii, 9), sarà facile apprezzare in cina che pure, in termini diversi, ha conosciuto un secolo fa un suo “rinascimento” (hu shi) l’attenzione ai classici e il desiderio di renderli vivi e attuali, al servizio del presente. e infine, la fondamentale fiducia antropologica, l’idea di un dovere-diritto umano di valorizzare liberamente le proprie potenzialità e al tempo stesso il bisogno di armonia e di pace... tutto questo troverà sicuramente qui un eco. per non dire dell’appello alla bellezza, come ultima istanza di verità. pechino, 20 aprile 2010 works cited bori, pier c, and saverio marchignoli. pluralita delle vie: alle origini del discorso sulla dignita umana di pico della mirandola. milano: feltrinelli, 2000. print. bori, pier c., “the modern search for universalism in western culture.” culture, religion and the problem of universalism. ed. y. shibata. yokohama: meiji gakuin university, 1999. 19-30. print cassirer, ernst. "giovanni pico della mirandola: a study in the history of renaissance ideas." journal of the history of ideas. 3.3 (1942): 319-346. print. confucio, and alberto castellani. i dialoghi di confucio (lun yu ). firenze: sansoni, 1949. print. di napoli, g. giovanni pico della mirandola e la problematica dottrinale del suo tempo. roma: descle e, 1965. print. dionysius, areopagita, pseudo. günther heil, and adolf m. ritter. corpus humanist studies & the digital age bori 3.1 spring 2013 68 dionysiacum / ii, de coelesti hierarchia. de ecclesiastica hierarchia. de mystica theologia. epistulae. berlin: de gruyter, 1991. print. farmer, steve a. and pico della mirandola, g. syncretism in the west: pico's 900 theses (1486): the evolution of traditional, religious, and philosophical systems: with text, translation, and commentary. tempe, ariz: medieval & renaissance texts & studies 1998. print. garin, eugenio. giovanni pico della mirandola. vita e dottrina. firenze: f. le monnier, 1937. print. gentile, giovanni. “il concetto dell'uomo nel rinascimento.” giornale storico della letteratura italiana 67 (1916): 17-69. izutsu, toshihiko. sufism and taoism: a comparative study of key philosophical concepts. berkeley: university of california press, 1984. print. lubac, henri, and georges chantraine. histoire et esprit: l'intelligence de l’écriture d'après origène. paris: e d. du cerf, 2002. print. ---. pic de la mirandole: e tudes et discussions. paris: aubier montaigne, 1974. print. wirszubski, chaim. pico della mirandola's encounter with jewish mysticism. cambridge, mass: harvard university press, 1989. print. humanist studies & the digital age bori 3.1 spring 2013 69 pico della mirandola, g., francesco borghesi, michael papio, and massimo riva. oration on the dignity of man: a new translation and commentary. new york: cambridge university press, 2012. print. pico della mirandola, g., and francesco bausi. discorso sulla dignita dell'uomo. parma: fondazione pietro bembo, 2003. print. pico della mirandola, g., pier c. bori, massimo riva, and michael papio. progetto pico: pico pro ect: de hominis dignitate: un progetto di collaborazione tra universita degli studi di bologna e brown university. providence, ri: brown university dept. of italian studies, 1999. internet resource. pico della mirandola, g., and francesco bausi. opere complete. roma: lexis progetti editoriali, 2000. cd for computer. progetto pico/pico project. web. 12 dec. 2012. <www.brown.edu/departments/ italian_studies/pico>. pico della mirandola, g., eugenio garin. de hominis dignitate; heptaplus; de ente et uno; e scritti vari. firenze: vallecchi, 1942. print. fragment to hypertext..docx humanist studies & the digital age, 4.1 (2015) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.4.1.3351 from fragment to hypertext: adding layers of reading ernesto priani and ana maría guzman olmos in this paper we will suggest that a hypertextual representation of the text allows us to show different temporal layers of reading and add new ones. we use the notion “layers of reading” as a metaphor to explain how, historically, each reading of a text creates a new layer, an independent “stratum of meaning” that is superimposed to a previous reading. the metaphor comes from geology, of course, but it is also found in software. when we first thought about “layers”, we had in mind a photoshop tool called layer that lets you draw over a figure you made before, without changing it. the way in which this tool works is by organizing your picture in levels, so you can see the entire figure, while you are working only in one part (or layer) of it, and it encapsulates the other parts. at the end, your picture is the conjunction of the layers you have opened and drawn, but in the middle of the drawing process you can choose to work with some layers instead of others, and, of course, open a new layer to draw in it. any given text is a layer of reading. it has references to other works and it is an effort to organize and expose a meaning of those works. it’s evidence that someone has gathered and transformed his readings in a new text, in the way that bees collect pollen and turn it into honey as erasmus describes reading (cf. vandendrope, 2009, 117). when we take the text and edit it as a hypertext, we can create layers from it in the same way the tool we just described does, making the connection between this text and its sources, and with subsequent readings of the text through history, and adding new notes and interpretations. hypertext then makes the construction of a complex historical model of reading possible in a way that, resembling a rock, exposes temporal layers of reading. to show how this notion of layers of reading works with the hypertext, we will use the bologna/brown online edition of the 900 theses of giovanni pico della mirandola1, because pico’s text is an extraordinary model of a layer of reading, and the hypertextual edition shows how, from one layer, we can add new ones beneath and above pico’s text. i.pico’s layer of reading eucharius silber published pico’s 900 theses in 1486 in rome. this text is formed by small paragraphs written around other philosophers’ ideas that summarize pico’s statements. if we have to compare this text with some kind of modern publication, we could say that pico has made a tumblr, using that microblogging platform to collect in small 1 we can have another example of layers of reading in the edition of homer’s odyssey by the perseus project, in which we find annotations and translations added to the text from 1886 to 1919. http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/ http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/ http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=perseus:text:1999.01.0135 humanist studies & the digital age priani & guzman olmos 4.1 (2015) 109 sentences his readings about other philosophers’ ideas. in any case, pico describes his work in this way in the prefacio: the following nine hundred dialectical, moral, physical, mathematical, metaphysical, theological, magical, and cabalistic opinions, including his own and those of the wise chaldeans, arabs, hebrews, greeks, egyptians, and latins, will be disputed publicly by giovanni pico of mirandola, the count of concord. in reciting these opinions, he has not imitated the splendor of the roman language, but the style of speaking of the most celebrated parisian disputers, since this is used by almost all philosophers of our time. the doctrines to be debated are proposed separately by nation and their sect leaders, but in common in respect to the part of philosophy -as though in a medley, everything mixed together. the complexity of the text we have in front of us is this: on the one hand, the theses are about a considerable diversity of topics from dialectic to cabalistic, and on the other hand, they are about a large group of authors from different philosophical traditions. this means that the 900 theses are, first of all, an extraordinary collection of readings. but how could we know the way in which pico made those readings? how could we know, in general, how people approached a text in a determined epoch? we think that texts are the materialization of readings. this means we could find in a text the vestiges of how, at a specific time, people read with particular goals, certain intentions and specific tools. through its textual structure, literary style, and organization, the text makes the evidence of a specific reading form visible. in the case of philosophical works, like pico’s 900 theses, this appearance of the reading in the writing is also an evidence of the way he did philosophy: because it shows its methodology of reading. in sum, the presence of all these elements in a text is what we call a layer of reading. the 900 theses represent the materialization of an enormous batch of pico’s reading material. if we could discover the footprints in the text of how he had approached its readings, we would find the nature of the layer of pico’s reading: its goal, intentions, tools, and, as a result, the way he did philosophy. we know pico’s reading goal by his own declaration in the 900 theses, but also through de hominis dignitate and a letter to bienivieni of november 12 (bori, 2000, 25), 1486: he reads for a public debate with theologians. in fact, most reverend fathers, i was not unaware that this disputation proposal of mine, would reveal itself as grateful and enjoyable to all you, who favor the good arts and have been willing to honor this discussion with your very authoritative presence, as it would be, on the contrary, troublesome and unpleasant to many others. (pico, de hominis dignitate, paragraph, 161,) the nature of his aim implies certain issues. because it was he who proposed the debate, he was the one who defines the object, the style, and the organization of it through the structure of the 900 theses. at the same time, in all these structural elements of the text he left traces of how he read: http://www.brown.edu/departments/italian_studies/pico/ humanist studies & the digital age priani & guzman olmos 4.1 (2015) 110 a) in the specific textual structure. in the thesis or conclusion, that is a fragmented and concentrated evidence of reading, we can see that he reads to produce a statement that synthesizes ideas. reading for pico is an act of collecting, summarizing, and memorizing (farmer, 1998, 50). b) in style of speaking. the so-called “paris style,” a less sophisticated type of latin used among theologians, shows us that pico reads to translate complex ideas in a comprehensible form (baussi, 1996, 167). c) in organization. pico organizes the conclusions in two sets of paragraphs: one according to other philosophers’ works, organized by nation and their sect leaders, and another according to pico’s own opinion. by doing so, pico distinguished his own thought from that of others, in recognition of the authority of those he had read. the theses are gathered under the authority of someone that had not directly produced the sentence, but probably the idea. pico’s reading practice is certainly different from ours, and also different from, for example, hegel’s. we can understand this differences because their goals and intentions are not the same, but also because the tools utilized to read are different. it is important to emphasize this difference because thinking about a layer of reading makes sense only in relation to others layers. it is in the limit with other practices where the particularities of a layer are shown. in the nature of pico’s specific enterprise, we can see some determinations of the material conditions of texts. as farmer has pointed out, the 900 theses were published at a time when manuscripts were being replaced by printed books, with the consequent impact in the way pico read. farmer writes: as we see in pico, printing made more sources widely available than at any earlier stage of western history, encouraging syncretically minded thinkers to incorporate increasingly broad bodies of traditions into their systems and rendering those systems progressively open to philological and scientific attack… (farmer, 1998, 134). if this is the result of having printed books, it is the partial legacy of the manuscript culture. the oratorical and disputational rituals of pre-modern times served crucial mnemonic functions for intellectuals who even in privileged cases like pico’s rarely had access to the full range of sources they viewed as authoritative. how often the ‘texts’ that pico set out to reconcile were inventions of reconstructive memory -a situation obviously easing any syncretic taskis underscored by the fact that numerous citations in pico’s theses can be shown to be loose paraphrases rather than exact quotations: pico’s famous eidetic memory, like those commonly ascribed to pre-modern intellectuals elsewhere, can be shown on hard textual evidence to have been an illusion (farmer, 1998, 134). at this point, we can see the nature of pico’s layer of reading: the incredible amount of references to authors, texts and topics, thanks to the printed books; the fascinating decision to organize them in a way that is neither historical nor temporal, but thematic, in the humanist studies & the digital age priani & guzman olmos 4.1 (2015) 111 manner of one grouping notes to prepare a discussion; the intention to extract this knowledge and put it in a brief paragraph, written in a style that the opposition could understand and memorize, a practice from the manuscript tradition; its attribution to an authority instead of an author, itself the result of the conjunction between two material conditions of the text, printed books and the manuscript era. in sum, pico’s 900 theses have an extraordinary amount of information about how pico read and, by extension, pico’s philosophical method. ii. on how we read a fragmented text for us, modern readers of pico’s works, the particularities of the 900 theses imply a paradoxical challenge in this context: how do we read it? this is the most important question for those who study pico’s philosophy. the text of the 900 theses, because of its structure and organization, is not discursive or argumentative, and it is hard to understand for the modern reader. we do not have, as well, the clue that perhaps could explain the text as a whole: the public dispute. but to read it, we have a determinate entity: the 900 thesis is a printed book, and we read printed books as unified works, without regard of the nature of the text, and under the hypothesis that the unity of the text is result of the author’s intention. these are elements of our reading practice that at the end are also determinations for the methodology we use to do research. on this christian vandendrope (2009, 144) says: once they are brought together in the material structure of a book, then, even texts initially conceived as fragments can no longer be read as disconnected pieces, since the nature of the collection in which they are included and their connection with the author automatically play a unifying role. fragments in the world of the book and printed matter are thus always elements of a unified work, and they are read as such. scholars who have studied pico in our time read the 900 theses as an unified text. a consequence of this is the extraordinary ambition to understand why pico had put all the theses together in the way he did. hence they follow two strategies to reconstruct “pico’s intentions”. first, they suggest that we could read the theses looking for an internal relation between the conclusiones. for example biondi writes: “comunque il montaggio delle tesi ubbidisce ad un disegno -una <<occulta concatenatio>>che é possibile esplicitare, contro ogni tentazione di considerarle una congerie senza senso” (biondi, 1995, xvi) farmer has followed the same idea in his edition of the 900 theses: numerological patterns pervade the nine hundred theses, suggesting that another structure is hidden there. moreover, that structure was apparently tied to some mystical and eschatological plan underlying pico's entire project. the outlines of that plan become clearer when we recall the reverse historical order (as pico understood it) of the first part of his text: the theses of the latin scholastics are followed by those of the arab, greek, chaldean, egyptians, and hebrew "nations." the importance of this sequence is suggested in both the oration and apology, which tell us that "all wisdom emanated from the barbarians to the greeks, from the humanist studies & the digital age priani & guzman olmos 4.1 (2015) 112 greeks to us," and further in the apology, where we find that the hebrew cabala contained "the secret declarations of god" and "the true sense of the law received from the mouth of god" by moses; in the heptaplus, we find that pythagoras and apparently plato too drew deeply on this secret mosaic wisdom (farmer, 1998, 32). the idea is that we can find a series of connections between conclusions, which organizes the 900 theses in a more unified text. in this approach, each conclusion acquires sense in relation to other paragraphs, so they conform to an internal organization that reveals the author’s intentions. secondly, scholars try to reconstruct pico’s mind by looking for the sources of its text, in order to restore pico’s reading and understanding of them. for instance, farmer notices in the 45 conclusions according to thomas that: the order of these theses suggests that the first half or so were drawn from thomas’s commentary on the sentences, with the rest inspired by his de ente et essentia and various aristotelian commentaries. only the last two conclusions were apparently drawn from the summa theologiae... he also includes theses to point out inconsistencies in thomas’s thought. a copy of petrus bergomensis’s concordantiae conclusionum in quibus thomas de aquino videtur sibi contradicere (1476) was apparently in pico’s library and may have been used in compiling this section (farmer, 1998, 218). for farmer, pico’s readings of aquinas in the 900 theses refer to four different books. the first one, the commentary on the sentences, is in turn referring to another book, the sentences of peter lombard. the last one, by petrus bergomensis, is a reading and fragmented reference to aquinas’s works. under this reading, each conclusion is connected with others through the books they are extracted from, so we can complete pico’s 900 theses finding the text referred to directly or indirectly by him, in order to make the text more readable, complete or unified, as a way to better understand how pico thought. we can ask, with maría teresa rodríguez (2012, 54), could this be the best model to understand pico? el estatuto ontológico del fragmento supone que en sí mismo, en su fragmentariedad, hace referencia a un “todo” y por ello su caracterización más propia es la incompletud. la historiografía filosófica, como hemos visto a partir del caso de brucker, se ha impuesto la tarea ingente de restablecer el pensamiento completo de los filósofos a partir de los fragmentos. ¿es ello una estrategia adecuada? ¿evidencia o proporciona siempre un conocimiento significativo sobre estos autores y el momento particular en el que escriben? what we think is that a hypertextual edition could be an alternate strategy to approach the 900 theses in terms of being aware of the difference between the specific way pico read and wrote philosophy. humanist studies & the digital age priani & guzman olmos 4.1 (2015) 113 iii. the hypertextual edition the bologna/brown edition of the 900 theses (http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/) is organized following the structure proposed by pico. there is a menu on the left of the screen that shows this structure. from there you can go to the pages in which you see all the conclusions pico has grouped under one title, for example, the 45 conclusiones secundum thomas or the 71 conclusiones paradoxe. from here, but also from the menu, you can go to each single conclusion, which has its own page. we have, then, the conclusion as both a unit and an organizational structure. at the level of the conclusion, the edition enables readers to see notes written around each of the theses. these notes can be translations, text analyses, philological interpretations, connections between the theses, books or fragments of books that have been referred by pico. the same unit allows readers to follow various researchers’ approaches to the text and to recover different perspectives around each conclusion. at the end, the hypertextual edition of the 900 theses lets us see the whole structure of pico’s work, but also the completeness of the single conclusion as a text, and a different layer of reading. the central element here is this focus on the conclusion as the fundamental unit, an effect of hypertextuality. in a paper book we can't have each conclusion as an independent element of the book. all of them are part of a dominant organization that we take as a unit. as hypertextuality deconstructs this organization to its units, this order is seen only as an option. this consequence of hypertextuality, the apparition of single units as complete text (the theses in this case, but it could be paragraphs, pages, poems, verses) is a clue to how we build our digital reading. what we see is what we read: a fragment. “the main feature of hypertext is discontinuity -the jumpthe sudden displacement of the user’s position in the text” says aspen aarseth (2003, 771). this discontinuity is also a fragmentation (from, vanderdorpe (2009, 71): in a text on paper, the paragraphs or blocks of information are arranged in sequence, and the reader can access them essentially through contiguity, relying on a number of tabular elements. in a hypertext, the various blocks of information may be distinct and autonomous and may be located on a single ‘page’ or on separate ‘pages’. in a hypertextual edition, the author doesn't play a unifying role, because the structure, the order of the theses in our case, is not an expression of pico’s mind, but a choice of the reader: in a physical book, all the pages are present, but in the case of hypertext, they appear only at the request of the user. this creates a particular kind of reading situation, the main characteristic of which is that readers have to constantly make choices by clicking on one button or another to make various units of information appear. each button, each hyperlink, is thus an invitation to move forward, a promise of content (vanderdorpe, 2009, 133). http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/ http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/ http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/allsubsection.php?myid=sub10102&expand= http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/allsubsection.php?myid=sub10102&expand= http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/allsubsection.php?myid=sec203&expand= http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/singlethesis.php?myid=p2030001&expand=sec203 humanist studies & the digital age priani & guzman olmos 4.1 (2015) 114 that is the jump aarseth refers to. and when this jump -the click to go to another fragment is describing a text, we can ask: what is the text? imagine a book in which some of the pages appear to be missing, or the print is unreadable every 16 pages, or some of the pages are repeated while an equal number omitted. even if this copy is the only one we ever see, we automatically assume that it is not supposed to be this way and that a more correct version exists. [...] we do this out of lack of respect of the copy; it appears to misrepresent the ‘real’ text, even if such a thing may never have existed. in short, we prefer the imagined integrity of a metaphysical object to the stable version that we observe (aarseth, 2003, 764). with this exercise of imagination, aarseth questions the idea of a metaphysical perfection of the text, one in which, for example, pico would explain all of his decisions collecting the theses. instead he invited us to respect the text as it is. following this proposition, and focusing on the 900 theses hypertextual edition, what we see is what the text is: a conclusion, one single conclusion that is a complete and independent text. as we have already said, the hypertextual edition allows us, from this basic unit, to add annotations related to it. each one of these annotations is a reading of the conclusion and it can correspond to our reading or to readings made by anybody in the present or in the past. in this way we are adding layers of readings, a stratum of meaning that becomes part of our present reading of the texts. since we can add as many layers as we want, we can have, from one single conclusion, a complex methodological object reflecting the way that conclusion has been or could have been read. we can see the text, but we can see the history of how has been read as well. for example: in the hypertextual edition of the 900 theses, we can take a look to theses ii.11.34. we can read the complete text of the conclusion, as we can with any other conclusion, but we can also see its spanish translation made in 2010. we can see, as well, the previous textual comment on how to read id est v, as a v or a u, made in 2002. in this same conclusion we could add a note by farmer or biondi about the reference to the theology of pseudo-dionysius the areopagite in the text. and so on. by doing this, we won’t only have pico’s text, but we will see something like a rock formed by strata of reading, in which pico’s text is only one stratum. for us, this is a very interesting model of reading because we can see the history of a text through the ways in which it has been read. a digital edition could enable introducing different approaches to a text as a part of it in the same way bernard cerquiglini (1999, 75) thinks a digital edition could include the variants of a text. in this sense, we can see, referring to a single text, different ways to read it. for example: pico refers to the ideas of an authority instead of an author. the contemporary reader prefers to refer the same ideas to an author and a book. with this simple difference we can see how reading has changed, and how important is to us to understand those changes. pico thinks in terms of authorities; we, in terms of authors. http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/singlethesis.php?myid=p2110034&expand=sec211 humanist studies & the digital age priani & guzman olmos 4.1 (2015) 115 the digital representations of a text allows to visualize this difference hidden before in preceding editions and studies, because previous to the digital edition it was impossible to show, in paper editions, the process of formation of this “sedimented reading rocks.” like the photoshop tool, hypertext allows us to see some layers, encapsulate others and, at the same time, create new ones. in fact, it is by visualizing the layers that the opportunity to draw new readings arises. we think the digital edition and the digital reading could create a philosophical methodology, based on the awareness of the historical construction of each layer of reading. this is, according to us, an opportunity for philosophy to develop a model of digital work that takes advantage of the layers of reading to study the history of thought. works cited aarseth, espen j., “nonlinearity and literary theory” on the new media reader edited by noah wardrip-fruin and nick montfort, mit press, london, 2003. bausi, francesco, nec rhetor neque philosophus. leo s. olschki editore, 1996 biondi, albano, “introduzione”, conclusiones nongentae: le novecento tesi dell'anno 1486, l.s. olschki, firenze, 1995. bori, pier cesare. pluralitá delle vie: alle origini del discurso sulla dignidá umana di pico. feltrinelli editore milano, 2000. cavallo g., chartier, r., eds. historia de la lectura en el mundo occidental, taurus, méxico d.f., 2011. cerquiglini, bernard. in praise of the variant: a critical history of philology, the john hopkins university press, baltimore, 1999. farmer, s.a., syncretism in the west: pico’s 900 theses (1486) the evolution of traditional, religious and philosophical systems, mrts, arizona, 1998. university of brown, conclusiones cm, 2012, <http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/index.php > university of brown, universitá di bologna, pico project, 2012, < http://www.brown.edu/departments/italian_studies/pico/ > rodríguez, maría teresa, el comentario a una canción de amor de pico della mirandola y su crítica a la ontología ficiniana, tesis doctoral, unam, méxico d.f. vandendorpe, christian, from payprus to hypertext. toward the universal digital library. translate from french by phillis aronoff and howard scott. university of illinois press, 2009. http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/index.php http://www.brown.edu/departments/italian_studies/pico/ http://www.brown.edu/departments/italian_studies/pico/ http://www.brown.edu/departments/italian_studies/pico/ mapping petrarch in seventeenth-century italian travel writing humanist studies & the digital age, 1.1 (2011) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.1.1.1241 128 mapping petrarch in seventeenth-century italian travel writing nathalie hester, university of oregon abstract: through a brief overview of seventeenth-century italian travel writing, this article highlights the significant petrarchan presence in this corpus. petrarchan elements, from quotes of the canzoniere to references to the poet-wanderer, are found in accounts that vary greatly in terms of itinerary, narrative style, and the author’s reasons for traveling. for some italian travelers, petrarch is a fundamental point of reference in creating an authoritative “italian” travel narrative, both in terms of literary echoes and in representing the traveler-narrator. petrarchism, broadly defined, reaches across many forms of textual production in europe, including travel writing. scholars such as roland greene, for example, have shown how petrarchan notions of love were integrated into discourses on early modern empire by colonial european powers and in accounts such as those of columbus. in seventeenthcentury italian travel literature, petrarch, both the figure of the poet and his œuvre, is a pervasive and indeed sometimes determining presence in this corpus. these significant petrarchan elements point to a potential future direction for the petrarch project. indeed, there could be a virtual space for mapping the reception of petrarch in non-lyrical, more popular writing across geographical boundaries. a brief foray into seventeenth-century italian travel accounts reveals the reach of petrarch’s legacy, even in forms of writing that are traditionally considered nonliterary. certainly travel writing, while historical in theory, in practice has always incorporated elements of literature. but in the period following pietro bembo’s prose della volgar lingua (1525), which established boccaccio as the model for prose and petrarch for that of poetry and helped codify the italian literary canon, one finds in italian travel writing more programmatic allusions to canonical texts, including petrarch’s familiar letters and rerum vulgarium fragmenta. in a travel culture associated more and more with european colonial expansion and proto-statehood, italian travelers were progressively marginalized as a group. they turned to their literary heritage—a recognizable, internationally sanctioned form of cultural homogeneity—as a source of authority in their accounts and as a form of compensation for italy’s continued political fragmentation and its vulnerability to domination. the solution to italy’s historic placeless-ness was to establish italy’s literary heritage as the substitute “place” or home of italy.1 widely read and emulated, italian literature offered a legimitizing backdrop for narrating the experience of travel. in this context, petrarchan currents inform many italian travel accounts, from the humanist-courtier poet model in more literary travel writers’ self-fashioning as characters and narrators, to the subtle, briefer, yet still meaningful allusions in the scientific or http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ humanist studies & the digital age nathalie hester 1.1 winter 2011 129 journalistic accounts of the late 1600s. petrarch as peregrinus ubique, as homo viator, the “irrequieto turista,” as gianfranco contini calls him,2 the scholar, the citizen of the world inscribing himself in text for posterity; the humanist who writes while navigating on the river po, who despises sea travel, longs for otium, but continues to wander—all these facets of the petrarchan oeuvre are at hand, directly or indirectly, unconsciously or not, as travelers leave an italia that exists only in the imagination. the universalist, cosmopolitan petrarch, poet and character, remains, even when only in fleeting glimpses, an inherent part of italian perspectives and travel accounts. especially in moments of difficulty and nostalgia, italian travel writers sometimes inscribe themselves in the text as petrarchan figures.3 the epistolary travel account of pietro della valle (1586-1652) is replete with petrarchan resonances. his viaggi (travels, 1650-1663) reflects how italian travelers, whether they have ostensible literary ambitions or not, almost reflexively incorporate petrarchan allusions in their accounts. della valle, a roman adventurer, collector, poet, musical composer, and master of self-fashioning, journeyed through turkey, the middle east, and india for twelve years (1614-1626), following his own itinerary and using his own funds. his account consistently and emphatically incorporates elements of italian literary texts and genres, most notably petrarchan poetics but also the epic and the pastoral. della valle initially dons pilgrim’s garb, calls himself “il pellegrino” (“the pilgrim”), as the title page of his work indicates, and claims that the voyage is to serve as a respite from the tribulations of unrequited love. like petrarch (or sincero of sannazaro’s arcadia), della valle’s geographical movement is, ostensibly, a restless search for spiritual and intellectual comfort and consolation. in some of his poetry, he blames his suffering—in language that recalls both petrarch and sannazaro—on his beloved, a woman named beatrice boraccio: amai nel latio con quel cor sincero che me diè il cielo, et in mille e mille prove sempre hebbi costantissimo il pensiero: ma la donna infedele, a cui fer nuove voglie forse cangiar l’antica cura, e collocarla indegnamente altrove, poco la fede mia, poco la dura servitù di dieci anni al fin prestando, ingrata altrui si dona, a me si fura. piangendo all’hor de la mia patria in bando me ne andai disperato, e terre e mari corsi non pochi, sempre sospirando. in latium i loved with the sincere heart that the heavens gave me, and i kept my thoughts constant through thousands and thousands of trials. but the unfaithful woman, whose new desires made her change her old cares and ungraciously place them elsewhere, paid little notice to my faithfulness and to the tenacious servitude i accorded her for ten years, and gave herself to another, and stole herself away humanist studies & the digital age nathalie hester 1.1 winter 2011 130 from me. weeping, then, i left my homeland, banished and desperate, and i traveled to not a few lands and seas, sighing always.4 the choice of terzine are a dantean touch perhaps chosen because della valle also loved a beatrice, but the flavor and lexicon of the poem are petrarchan, especially in the final verses (“sempre sospirando”). for a traveler eager to reach posterity such as della valle, petrarch and the italian literary tradition remain automatic reference points. likening his suffering to that of great italian poets is an ideal strategy for obtaining fame and glory, which he did achieve in his lifetime. forty years later, a traveler without literary ambitions and with a more modest persona, francesco negri, left his hometown of ravenna in 1663 and undertook a three-year voyage in scandinavia. he was the first continental european to make an extensive journey through these northern regions. in negri’s epistolary account, viaggio settentrionale (northern travels, 1700), literary culture comes to the fore in the moments when negri recounts personal anecdotes. in one instance, as he faces exceedingly cold conditions and increasing isolation, negri turns to the writings of the italian literary and erudite tradition to express his emotional response. traveling alone northward, negri at one point loses a shoe in the deep snow and, when he finally retrieves it, is unable to put it back on because he no longer has feeling in his hands. he continues on nevertheless, carrying a shoe in one hand, and relates the event in petrarchan tones: in tal modo viaggiando, e sapendo che non è per finir questo sì scabroso viaggio in pochi giorni, ma che vi si ricercano settimane e qualche mese, e che sempre devono crescere difficoltà, io vado meco stesso parlando o ruminando in questa forma.—tu soffri molto, francesco, non è vero? ma dimmi, chi ti ha fatto venir in queste parti? nessuno. ci sei venuto spontaneamente per veder le curiosità. di chi dunque puoi lamentarti? (negri 333) traveling in such a way, and knowing that this extremely rough journey will not end in just a few days, but instead will require weeks or even months, and that difficulties will always increase, i go on speaking and ruminating to myself in this way: you suffer greatly, francesco, don’t you? but tell me; who made you come to these parts? no one. you came spontaneously to see curiosities. about whom, then, can you complain? in addressing himself by his first name, francesco, and emulating the tuscan poet’s style (“io vado meco stesso parlando” “i go on speaking to myself”), negri associates himself with the poet-pilgrim. in narrating moments of duress and implicit nostalgia for his patria, negri turns back to his italian literary roots for discursive models and expresses a specifically italian sensitivity. an end-of-century traveler from calabria, giovanni francesco gemelli careri (16481724), explicitly addresses literary issues in his viaggi per l’europa (1693, 1701), an epistolary work recounting a 1686 trip to northern europe. gemelli careri is best known for his giro del mondo (trip around the world) (1699-1700), the first account of an independent circumnavigation, but petrarchan elements are more easily noted in his letters humanist studies & the digital age nathalie hester 1.1 winter 2011 131 on europe. the opening of the first letter of the 1693 edition of the viaggi immediately foregrounds petrarchan epistolary models: “che a vostra signoria non sia … discaro leggere in queste mie lettere familiari le mal composte notitie de’ paesi che vado caminando” (“may it not be displeasing to your lordship [neapolitan lawyer amato danio] to read in these familiar letters of mine the poorly composed news of countries through which i go walking”) (viaggi per l’europa [1693] 1). in this typical apology for stylistic shortcomings, gemelli careri uses a petrarchan-like utterance, “vado caminando,” to bolster his authority as an italian traveler and connects his letter writing to the petrarchan epistolary model. gemelli careri’s letters about venice, where he spends carnival before crossing the alps, can be seen as a way to represent the city in italian terms—that is to say, by means of an italian literary language. fascinated by venice during carnival, gemelli careri takes stylistic liberties in order to evoke the festivities allowed before lent. one element of his discursive playfulness is to quote from petrarch’s canzoniere, so that the typical or expected rendition of reveling in venice takes on a distinctly literary flavor, but with an irreverent twist. when describing the effects of the celebratory climate on his writing skills, gemelli careri uses exaggerated and self-mocking tones to reflect the extravagant behavior of merrymakers, including himself: di san marco non occorre far parola questa volta, che troppo diverrei lungo e rincrescevole; riserbisi addunque alla settimana vegnente, tanto più, che dal vario stile, in cui piango, e ragiono in questa lettera, avrete voi per avventura compreso che la più parte del mio cervello s’è rimasta dietro la vanità del fugace secolo; e a volerlo porre sotto uno strettoio, non n’uscirebbe una gocciola di sugo, che valesse, sì traviato è ’l folle mio desio. (viaggi per europa [1701] 32) this is not the proper time to speak of san marco, because i would become too prolix and bothersome. let us save that then for next week, so that you’ll have understood, for the varied style in which i weep and speak, that most of my brain has followed the vanity of this fleeting life. and were my brain to be placed in a press, hardly one worthy drop of juice would be squeezed out. so far astray is my mad desire.5 these references to petrarch, however playful, nevertheless evoke the ultimate model of literary expression. later on, when moving from historical and political topics to personal anecdotes, gemelli careri makes an explicit reference to petrarch’s wandering, ostensibly alluding to his own discursive and geographical wanderings: addio vinegia, mi dite: e che digression pindarica si è stata cotesta? così tosto s’uscì di mente s[an] marco. confesso il vero … io mi sono uno smemorato, e petrarchevolemente me ne sono ito di pensier’ in pensier, di monte in monte. (viaggi per l’europa [1701] 75) humanist studies & the digital age nathalie hester 1.1 winter 2011 132 farewell, venice, you say. and what pindaric digression has this been? i’ve forgotten san marco so quickly. i shall confess the truth: i’m a forgetful one, and i have gone petrarch-like from thought to thought, from mountain to mountain.6 the italian perspective that gemelli careri constructs ultimately lies in the literary narration of the experience of travel, even before he arrives abroad. venice during carnival provides the ideal pretext of discursive freedom for a literary italian who is both traveling and travel writing—according to his newly coined adverb—“petrarchevolemente.” gemelli careri’s petrarchan explorations into epistolary travel writing continue in the second volume of letters from his european travels that are part of the second edition of the viaggi. the missives are marked as written from various cities on his way home from the siege of buda, and later back to northern europe, and then madrid and venice on separate trips. mixing the epic themes of love and war, this volume consists primarily of letters addressed to french women. the focus on erudition, intellectualism, and literature comes to the fore in gemelli careri’s letters to a certain camillotta pepini, which make up the central piece of this second volume. in the fiction of epistolary writing, he composes the letter after having returned to naples and includes in it the only example of his own poetry in his travel writing: a voi, che, più d’ogni altra cosa del mondo, tenete occupata la mia immaginazione, conviene, madama, se pure non voglio volontariamente morire, ch’io dirizzi, dopo l’arrivo in napoli, i primi tratti della mia penna […] e parmi che questa città non sia più quella medesima; e non mi truovo cosa che appagar possa il mio desio, e mi cruccio, e mi adiro, e mi confondo, e farnetico; perché troppo altamente sono in me impresse le accorte, oneste, care, e leggiadre vostre maniere, e ciò, che non è voi, già, per lung’ uso, il core odia, e disprezza. adesso sì, che parmi ver quell’amorosa metafisica del nostro petrarca, la quale, come che non sia capita dall’ignorante volgo de’ poetastri moderni; massimamente a coloro è affatto oscura, e nescosa, che non sanno o pur non hanno l’animo adattato a ricevere le vere impressioni di amore […] ancor’io ho fatto un sonetto, che mai non si fu mio il mestiere di farne e benché sappia quanto voi siete valente nel poetare, anche nel nostro linguaggio, e che gite dietro la traccia degli ottimi scrittori, non mi ritengo perciò di mandarlovi: perocché non sarei veramente divenuto poeta, se non avessi una rabbia accanita di mandar fuori i miei parti (che un moderno direbbe aborti poetici) senza aver tanta flemma di bene educarli, e di ripulirli. a voi tocca il corteggerlo [sic]. ite ardenti sospiri al dolce loco, ove colei, che del mio mal non cura, sen’ sta sì fiera in vista, e sì secura prendendo amore, e sua possanza a gioco. e quivi, armati di saette, e foco, stringete l’alma adamantine, e dura; humanist studies & the digital age nathalie hester 1.1 winter 2011 133 tal che si volga a più pietosa cura, e omai le incresca del mio pianger fioco. voi le mie pene a lei narrate, e come gridando vo, con affannata lena: ahi, chi mi asconde il bel guardo soave? poi ven’ tornate, con sue voglie dome, a far la vita mia lieta, e serena, ch’or vile altrui, non ch’a me stesso è grave. (viaggi per europa [1722], vol. 2, 197-98) for you, madam, who more than any other thing in the world captures my imagination, it is proper, lest i willingly wish to die, that i address to you the first strokes of my pen after arriving in naples,… and it seems to me that this city is no longer the same, and that i am unable to find that which can satisfy my desire, and i suffer, and become angry and confused, and i ramble; because your clever, honest, affectionate, and graceful ways are too deeply impressed in me. and whatever is not you, my heart, by ancient habit, hates and scorns. and now our petrarch’s metaphysics of love does seem true to me, as much as it is misunderstood by those ignorant plebes that are bad modern poets, especially those to whom it remains obscure and hidden, because they do not know how or do not have a soul able to receive the true impressions of love.[…] and i have also composed a sonnet, which was never my profession to write, and despite knowing how talented you are in poetry, even in our language, and that you go about emulating great writers, i will not refrain from sending it to you; because i would not have truly become a poet if i had not had a furious desire to bring forth my creation (which a modern would call a poetic failure) without the calmness needed to refine and polish it. to you falls the task of correcting it. go forth, burning sighs, to that sweet place where she, who does not heed my suffering remains, so proud to see, and so secure, taking love and his power as but a game. and there, armed with arrows and fire, besiege that hard and adamantine soul; so that it will turn to more merciful concerns, and so that she will take pity on my weakened laments. go and tell her of my pain, and how i go crying, short of breath: ah, who hides from me that beautiful, gentle gaze? and then return, with her will tamed, to make my life happy and serene, for now it is loathsome to others, and burdensome to me.7 humanist studies & the digital age nathalie hester 1.1 winter 2011 134 here, literary language is both discursive and meta-discursive, as gemelli careri comments on his writing and on poetic expression. the sonnet reflects arcadian precepts for writing poetry: the language and imagery are petrarchan and devoid of baroque conceits. he assesses the poetry of his contemporaries, much of which he appears to dislike. this poetic interlude helps represent gemelli careri as an italian moderno—at once connected to northern european culture through his letters to frenchwomen, but promoting petrarch as the ultimate model for contemporary poetic expression and a legitimate symbol of italian cultural renewal championed by academies such as the arcadia. these few examples suggest that, even in diluted form, petrarchan poetics play a powerful role in early modern italian travel writing. one can envision, perhaps in the not too distant future, a petrarch project that documents the far and broad reach of petrarch’s works into popular forms of textual production. a mapping of these instances where and when they occur could help us understand better the impact of petrarch in a plurality of texts written “petrarchevolmente.” 1 for an elaboration of this notion, see cachey, “an italian history of travel.” 2 see gianfranco contini’s introduction to his edition of the canzoniere, xv, and paolella, “petrarca: peregrinus an viator?” 3 for a more detailed treatment of petrarchan characteristics in seventeenth-century travel writing see hester, literature and identity in italian baroque travel writing. 4 translations are mine unless indicatd otherwise. the unpublished verses are conserved at the biblioteca estense universitaria in modena. see speelman, 10. for more information on della valle’s beloved, see salvante, 20, n.15. gaeta and lockhart identify della valle’s beloved as belisa or beatrice d’avalos. see i viaggi di pietro della valle, xxiii. 5 the translations into english of petrarch’s verses, canzoniere 1, v.5, and 6, v.1, are from petrarch’s lyric poems, ed. and trans. robert m. durling, 36, 40. in the account, gemelli careri also quotes from petrarch’s familiares. 6 the verse is from petrarch’s canzoniere, 129, v.1. 7 the quote comes from petrarch’s canzoniere, 116, vv.5-8: “et ho sì avezza / la mente a contemplar solo costei / ch’altro non vede, e ciò che non è lei / già per antica usanza odia e disprezza” (“and i have so / accustomed / my mind to contemplate her alone that it sees nothing else, and / whatever is not she, already by ancient habit it hates and scorns”; petrarch’s lyric poems 224). works cited cachey, theodore, j. jr. “an italian history of travel,” annali d' italianistica 14 (1996): 5564. print. humanist studies & the digital age nathalie hester 1.1 winter 2011 135 della valle, pietro. viaggi di pietro della valle, descritti da lui medesimo in 54 lettere familiari. mandate in napoli all' erudito suo amico mario schipano. 4 vols. rome: mascardi, 1650-1663. print. ---. i viaggi di pietro della valle. lettere dalla persia. eds. franco gaeta and laurence lockhart. rome: isituto poligrafico dello stato, 1972. print. gemelli careri, giovanni francesco. viaggi per europa. naples: giacomo raillard, 1693. ---. viaggi per europa. 2 vols. naples: giuseppe roselli, 1701-1704. print. greene, roland. unrequited conquests: love and empire in the colonial americas. chicago, il: university of chicago press, 1999. print. hester, nathalie. literature and identity in italian baroque travel writing. burlington, vt: ashgate press, 2008. print. negri, francesco. viaggio settentrionale. ed. enrico falqui. turin: edizioni alpes, 1929. print. paolella, alfonso. “petrarca: peregrinus an viator?” annali d’italianistica 14 (1996): 152-76. print. petrarca, francesco. canzoniere. ed. gianfranco contini. turin: einaudi, 1964. print. ---. petrarch’s lyric poems. ed. and trans. robert m. durling. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1976. print. salvante, rafaella. il “pellegrino” in oriente: la turchia di pietro della valle (1614-1617). florence: edizioni polistampa firenze, 1997. print. speelman, raniero. “uno sconosciuto ‘west-östlicher divan’ di pietro della valle.” ejos 5(5) (2002): 1-38. web. 26 jan. 2011. <http://web.archive.org/web/20051103062858/www2.let.uu.nl/solis/anpt/ejos/pdf5/speelmanfin.pdf>. http://web.archive.org/web/20051103062858/www2.let.uu.nl/solis/anpt/ejos/pdf5/speelmanfin.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20051103062858/www2.let.uu.nl/solis/anpt/ejos/pdf5/speelmanfin.pdf mapping petrarch in seventeenth-century italian travel writing nathalie hester, university of oregon works cited humanist studies & the digital age, 2.1 (2012) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.2.1.2981 8 studiare dopo internet alberto sobrero, università la sapienza di roma abstract: the internet changes our ways of both knowing and thinking. a person who has grown up using the internet, whether for school or simply to play videogames, tends to extend and reproduce the same model of knowing in other instances. the internet replaces a linear and centralized model with a circular and diffused framework for self-learning that presents certain familiar limits: it demands speed or, at least, not pausing. the internet user is omnivorous, in a rush, and develops a memory that is limited to the short term. however, there are some positive aspects of circular learning that should be emphasized: the possibility of constructing personal paths, comparing different opinions, innovating, overcoming old disciplinary divisions, surmounting the drawbacks of linear learning that often lead to uncritical and purely molecular thinking. la rete modifica sia il modo di conoscere che di pensare. una mente cresciuta sulla rete, facendo ricerche per la scuola, o semplicemente giocando, tende a riprodurre anche in altre occasioni lo stesso modello di conoscenza. a un modello lineare la rete sostituisce un modello circolare e diffuso di autoapprendimento che presenta alcuni noti limiti: richiede di correre, o per lo meno richiede di non fermarsi. l’utente della rete è onnivoro e ha fretta e matura una memoria chiusa nel breve termine. ci sono tuttavia aspetti positivi dell'apprendimento circolare che vanno sottolineati: la possibilità di costruirsi propri percorsi, sondare diverse opinioni, innovare, superare vecchie partizioni disciplinari, superando i difetti dell'apprendimento lineare che molto spesso induce a un pensiero acritico e premente molecolare. io mi colloco fra coloro che hanno incontrato abbastanza presto i problemi dell’informatica e coloro che sembrano rifiutare l’idea stessa che il mondo dei nostri studi stia radicalmente cambiando; fra quelli che riescono a tenere dietro alla rivoluzione permanente della rete e quei colleghi che si disperano per l’ignoranza dei nostri studenti, e si meravigliano che anche i più bravi non abbiano letto guerra e pace, l’ulisse, o argonauti del pacifico. eppure, diciamo trent’anni fa, mi avevano avvertito. io ho cominciato a parlare di queste cose con tre maestri. e prima di fare alcune riflessioni generali li vorrei ricordare: sono giorgio cardona, armando petrucci e alberto cirese. in qualche modo tutti e tre anticiparono l’ingresso del computer nelle nostre stanze. humanist studies & the digital age alberto sobrero 2.1 fall 2012 9 ognuno di loro, in tempi e situazioni diverse, mi ha insegnato qualcosa. giorgio cardona mi ha insegnato come il linguaggio del computer avrebbe cambiato non solo il modo di scrivere, ma principalmente il modo di pensare. con armando petrucci ragionammo sulla possibilità e sulle difficoltà di un catalogo unico della letteratura popolare a stampa. la letteratura popolare non può definirsi se non nel suo contesto e questo è l’aspetto più difficile da formalizzare e che, dunque, rendeva petrucci scettico sull’utilità del progetto. cirese il computer lo aveva atteso… lavorando con le schede perforate, con repertori, regesti, cataloghi. nel 1979 a villa mirafiori entrò il commodore con 32 k di ram, poi il commodore 64 e via via macchine sempre più potenti. un po’ tutti, con le lezioni di carlo cellucci, avevamo imparato a programmare in basic. e il merito di cirese fu quello di sottolineare subito la differenza tra un uso attivo e un uso passivo della macchina, la possibilità, come aveva scritto, di “comandare a un servo che non ha paura della morte” (cirese). fino agli ultimi anni cirese continuò ad aggiornarsi, a studiare manuali. e penso che sia rimasto ingabbiato in questa contraddizione. non si adattò mai all’idea che la macchina diventasse sempre più autonoma, sempre più senza padrone, o che il padrone fosse collettivo e invisibile. con il computer voleva avere un rapporto personale, a due: un rapporto che finiva per essere inevitabilmente un rapporto con se stesso. volle gestire il computer sfidandolo, come pensava fosse dovere di un intellettuale, ma forse finì per gestirlo con la mentalità di un intellettuale di altri tempi. queste premesse servono per introdurre alcune considerazioni generali sul tema assegnatomi: studiare dopo internet. il tema è vastissimo ed è difficile dire qualcosa di nuovo. mi limito a offrire alcuni argomenti di discussione. comincio con il commentare due fra le affermazioni più frequenti intorno a questa questione. la prima è l’affermazione secondo la quale la rete sta modificando il nostro modo di pensare e addirittura il nostro cervello. per molti aspetti è un’affermazione vera, per altri meno. l’affermazione può essere assunta in tre versioni. per capirci direi in una versione fortissima, in una versione forte e in una versione debole. cominciamo non dalla prima, ma dalla versione forte, dall’idea che negli individui cambiamenti nella funzionalità e nello stesso assetto neurologico possano darsi in presenza di esperienze e sensazioni diverse. in questo senso penso che l’affermazione sia vera. l’assetto dei 100 miliardi (o quanti sono) di neuroni che abbiamo in testa è quanto mai plastico: e sia nella filogenesi che nell’ontogenesi questa è stata la proprietà più significativa del cervello. in antropologia cognitiva ci sono molte osservazioni su come le modalità della conoscenza possano modificare alcuni aspetti del complesso sistema di modulazione e demodulazione simbolica del mondo esterno e interno. e proprio cardona aveva iniziato in italia studi in questa direzione. restando al nostro tema si potrebbe supporre, ad esempio, che lavorando con il computer per ore e ore si possa sviluppare di più l’emisfero sinistro rispetto al destro, le disposizioni analitiche rispetto a quelle di sintesi, l’elaborazione digitale rispetto alla percezione analogica. è vero, ad esempio, che alcune forme di memoria spazio-temporale tendono a potenziare le aree del cervello preposte all’orientamento spaziale. o molto semplicemente che l’esercizio della memoria potenzia i circuiti neuronali interessati al trasferimento delle informazioni nella memoria a lungo termine. direi di più: come vedremo humanist studies & the digital age alberto sobrero 2.1 fall 2012 10 subito, stare molto al computer rende più difficile leggere libri; lo sperimentiamo ogni giorno e principalmente lo vediamo nei nostri studenti. ovviamente tutt’altra cosa è la versione fortissima della nostra affermazione, l’ipotesi che la macchina cerebrale possa, in relazione ai modi e ai contenuti della conoscenza, subire cambiamenti nella sua forma base, reintrodurre, insomma, un’ipotesi di tipo lamarckiano. nel nostro caso, ad esempio, dovremmo dire che, nel lungo periodo, lo sviluppo del linguaggio digitale potrebbe diventare fattore selettivo nell’evoluzione della specie. e, dunque, che si vada verso la morte del libro per l’incapacità di leggerlo. non mi addentro in problemi evoluzionistici di questa natura. lo scetticismo rispetto a un’interpretazione fortissima del rapporto fra macchina del cervello e modi del conoscere mi viene piuttosto da un altro aspetto della questione, dall’osservazione che, non dico il computer, ma la rete è molto meno digitale di quanto normalmente si pensi. una cosa è il metodo di manipolazione e trasmissione dei dati, la riduzione del mondo a un codice binario, e questo è il linguaggio del computer, altra cosa sono le disposizioni cognitive che dobbiamo mettere in atto per una ricerca in rete, o davanti, ad esempio, a un testo multimediale. mettiamo da parte la vecchia immagine del cervello che conosce il mondo e sostituiamola piuttosto con la nozione di mente, come fra i primi la intesero maturana e varela, e in campo antropologico gregory bateson, e come la intende ormai tanta scienza del novecento: la mente come insieme di sistemi che permettono a un organismo di scambiare con l’ambiente esterno informazioni, trasformando così se stesso e il proprio ambiente. una pianta e il proprio ambiente formano una mente, come qui dentro in questa giornata noi formiamo una mente (almeno speriamo). ogni uomo è il luogo di molte menti, di molte relazioni, di molte storie. e allora si tratta di studiare i linguaggi della mente, i sistemi di comunicazione attraverso i quali i messaggi vivono e si trasmettono all’interno della mente, o meglio all’interno di quella che bateson chiamava la creatura, l’insieme delle menti. non vorrei andare troppo avanti lungo questa pista e del resto sono argomenti ben noti, quel che mi interessa sottolineare è che non c’è una conoscenza analogica e una conoscenza digitale fra loro separate, ma che da sempre abbiamo comunicato con il mondo grazie a quel corpo calloso che lega fra loro i due emisferi e continueremo a pensare, a comunicare e a vivere in questo modo; questo è anzi uno dei caratteri precipui della nostra specie nel regno animale. i messaggi tra noi e il mondo, i messaggi attraverso i quali entriamo in relazione con il mondo e con noi stessi che siamo parte del mondo sono di varia natura, corrono lungo strade diverse, ma di certo sono sia analogici che digitali e probabilmente prevedono anche qualcosa di più, qualcosa su cui comunque qui non è il caso di fermarci. se la versione forte della nostra affermazione dice che la pratica di un pensiero digitale modifica l’assetto plastico del nostro cervello, la versione debole ci dice che questo accade da sempre, che da sempre la mente ha avuto bisogno per comunicare con il mondo del linguaggio analogico e del linguaggio digitale, di un emisfero che ci rende parte del territorio e di un emisfero che dall’esterno ci costruisce mappe. humanist studies & the digital age alberto sobrero 2.1 fall 2012 11 esclusa la versione fortissima, la versione forte può interessare i neuroscienziati: di certo è fondamentale vedere come la struttura plastica del cervello si conforma all’esperienza sensibile. per noi antropologi interessante è piuttosto l’aspetto debole di questa affermazione, osservare come le modalità e i contenuti del conoscere siano strettamente connessi e come questo passi attraverso tutte le mediazioni e tutti gli strumenti che definiscono il rapporto fra noi e il mondo. tra noi e il mondo c’è la storia della specie, ci sono gli altri, c’è la nostra cultura, ma anche la nostra capacità di manipolare il mondo, di costruire strumenti che potenziano la nostra presenza: dagli strumenti più semplici ai più raffinati. dentro lo spazio della mente c’è l’addomesticamento delle piante e degli animali, ma anche la stampa, il treno e ora il computer e la rete. con ognuna di queste innovazioni cambia in qualche modo la dimensione spazio-temporale della nostra mente. con molte differenze, ma in base ad analoghi principi. non ho bisogno di citazioni varie per dire che, a maggior ragione, l’insieme costituito da l’autore, dal testo e dal suo lettore è una mente e che questa mente è ovviamente diversa a seconda delle mediazioni che attraversa. la rete è una mente e, come ogni altra mente, è per sua natura dialogica, plurilogica. che poi la sua configurazione la renda stupida o intelligente, è altra questione. la seconda affermazione che vorrei brevemente commentare è quella secondo la quale dopo quella della scrittura, la rivoluzione della rete, negli ultimi dieci-quindici anni, è la seconda vera rivoluzione culturale. anche in questa affermazione c’è indubbiamente molto di vero: la scoperta della stampa ha avuto una rilevanza sociale e culturale enorme e forse decisiva nel passaggio alla modernità, ma, in fondo, era un estremo perfezionamento della scrittura. e così per il computer nelle sue prime fasi. in ambedue i casi si trattava solo di uno sviluppo, per quanto immenso, delle capacità della memoria, un’estensione del deposito del sapere e della velocità della sua diffusione. direi di più: c’è stato un breve periodo, pochi decenni, nei quali, rispetto alla scrittura, l’oralità sembrava destinata a recuperare il terreno perduto. la comunicazione sembrava scommettere più sulla radio, sui registratori, o sul telefono, che non sulla stampa o sulle fotocopie. il passaggio alla rete ha segnato una svolta qualitativa: la rete permette di sapere diversamente. e, a differenza di quanto è accaduto per la scrittura, nel caso della rete la svolta è stata improvvisa. in questo senso non mi sembra esagerato usare il termine rivoluzione. tutto vero, e sul quel sapere diversamente ci torneremo subito. ma, anche in questo caso credo che rimanga valido quel principio di marshall mcluhan secondo cui “il ‘contenuto’ di un medium è sempre un altro medium” (mcluhan 16). è un principio che può essere interpretato in molti modi, ma che proporrei di intendere non nel senso che il mezzo di comunicazione tecnologicamente più avanzato fagocita il precedente, né nel senso che lo sostituisce, ma semplicemente nel senso che sul piano della comunicazione i diversi sistemi di trasmissione ridefiniscono le loro postazioni e i loro campi di influenza, disegnano diversamente i loro confini: in molti casi si accostano semplicemente l’uno all’altro, in altri si escludono, si sovrappongono, o si fondono. humanist studies & the digital age alberto sobrero 2.1 fall 2012 12 parliamo pure di rivoluzione, ma è bene sottolineare che anche in questo caso non c’è una linea evolutiva unica. per dirla con l’immagine tradizionale non stiamo di fronte a un albero, ma a un cespuglio, a un moltiplicarsi e intrecciarsi di linee e possibilità di comunicazione. quello che è ormai acclarato per l’evoluzione nel suo tratto biologico, vale anche nel tratto culturale. in questo senso proprio lo stesso studio della letteratura popolare insegna molto: come diceva una grande esperta della materia, la studiosa francese geneviève bollème, la letteratura popolare a stampa è una letteratura scritta da chi non sa scrivere per chi non sa leggere. e come nel caso della letteratura popolare bisogna intendere l’opposizione oralità versus scrittura in un senso molto debole, così si può osservare come nella rete il rapporto fra i diversi sistemi di comunicazione sia quanto mai intrigato. per certi versi è come se si fosse ingranata la marcia indietro. la stampa aveva superato i testi dei copisti, aveva escluso il rischio di errori, di falsificazioni, di correzioni, l’idea delle possibili varianti. i testi collaborativi della rete ci riportano a prima della stampa, possono cambiare in continuazione, non sono mai definitivi. ma questo è solo un primo passo, poi c’è il secondo; il ritorno, appunto verso l’oralità: come nei forum e in wikipedia. una cosa che consiglio sempre, a chi consulta wikipedia, specie nei casi di voci apparentemente più neutre, è quella di cliccare sullo spazio discussione. ci sono voci corrette centinaia e migliaia di volte. interventi che dissentono, che propongono, che rimandano ad altre voci, ad altri punti di vista. alla formazione di wikipedia collaborano, oggi 8 gennaio 2012, 703mila persone. si dice sempre del paradosso per il quale in wikipedia gli argomenti più complessi sono quelli che faticano a trovare un equilibrio e quindi sono apparentemente trattati nel modo più neutro e quasi anonimo, ma bisogna appunto andare all’origine di quell’apparente anonimato, alla discussione di cui la voce è il prodotto. vi inviterei, per esempio, a confrontare la voce bunga-bunga nell’edizione in inglese e in quella in italiano. in inglese: bunga bunga is a phrase of uncertain meaning that dates from 1910 if not earlier. by 2010 the phrase had gained popularity in italy and the international press as well, when it was used by the italian prime minister silvio berlusconi to refer to his alleged sex parties, which caused a major political scandal in italy. 1 in italiano, dopo lunga discussione e votata a maggioranza: l'espressione xix secolo, in particolare nella letteratura odeporica e nella manualistica botanica, prevalentemente come toponimo dell'australia o come usanza aborigena della stessa nazione. il termine è stato poi ripreso nel 1910, nell'ambito di un celebre scherzo, durante il quale ne è stata volutamente fatta intendere un'origine africana, con l'attribuzione di un significato incerto. 2 è noto, del resto, come nupedia, la prima wikipedia, sia fallita proprio perché le voci venivano “controllate” da un team di esperti. il passaggio da nupedia a wikipedia era il passaggio da una forma di scrittura pre-stampa, a qualcosa che assomiglia molto ai modi della comunicazione orale. humanist studies & the digital age alberto sobrero 2.1 fall 2012 13 la rivoluzione della rete va intesa quindi non come un taglio netto, uno spartiacque fra il prima e il dopo, ma come un moltiplicarsi dei supporti e dei modi della comunicazione e un loro riassestarsi in confini ed equilibri diversi. facciamo esempi più seri. la voce evoluzione. la voce inglese, prevede 279 references, un archivio di qualche centinaia di pagine di discussione, i pro e i contro, le prove, l’analisi dei testi, una catena infinita di rinvii etc. in questo caso anche la versione dell’edizione italiana (fatta se capisco bene da telmo pievani) ha suscitato dal 2005 un discreto dibattito, tecnico e ideologico. ma prendiamo un’altra voce cultura. nel dizionario inglese, la voce prende varie pagine e la discussione dal 2004 a oggi è ininterrotta e archiviata anno per anno. nella versione in italiano il testo è una versione ridotta della voce inglese, ma senza nessuna discussione. quel che spesso noi docenti non sappiamo fare e insegnare è non tanto saltare il baratro fra la comunicazione della lezione orale o del testo scritto e il nuovo flusso comunicativo della rete, ma non vedere i ponti fra la vecchia e la nuova oralità, fra la vecchia e la nuova scrittura, all’interno della rete. i molti possibili collegamenti e attraversamenti fra i diversi flussi di comunicazione. molte cose sono cambiate, ma molte sono rimaste uguali e non potranno cambiare più di tanto, ma richiedono una gestione diversa. è chiaro che, contrariamente a quanto di solito si pensa, l’interesse di wikipedia sta spesso proprio nella molteplicità dei suoi linguaggi, nella pluralità delle fonti, nella non chiusura dei testi, più che nel testo finale. più in quello che non appare che in quello che appare. noto solo un altro aspetto fra i tanti possibili. se cercate, poniamo lévi-strauss in italiano, trovate un paio di pagine, delle quali, per esperienza, riconosco, o credo di riconoscere l’autore. la discussione è inesistente. se andate nella pagina francese vi trovate ovviamente un articolo molto più significativo, ma principalmente se cliccate sullo spazio della discussione siete rinviati ai diversi progetti, in questo caso al projet d’anthropologie, dove wikipedia nell’edizione francese è approfondita e adeguatamente francesizzata, come contenuti e come discussioni. non è difficile vedere dietro l’impostazione dell’edizione francese di wikipedia una politica culturale e una comunità scientifica che nell’edizione in italiano sembra del tutto assente. veniamo ora brevemente alla fruizione del mezzo da parte degli studenti. wikipedia è nata se non sbaglio nel 2001 e le reti sociali – le varie myspace, facebook, etc. – si sono moltiplicate a partire dalla metà del passato decennio, e, dunque, gli studenti di oggi sono grosso modo la prima generazione nata culturalmente nella rete. premetto che della crisi dell’università gli studenti sono davvero gli ultimi responsabili, né penso che la colpa si possa dare alla rete. sta di fatto che la rete ha modificato tempi e modi dello studio e, in primo luogo, il rapporto con il libro. sono cose che sappiamo bene, di cui si è discusso molto e di cui tutti abbiamo esperienza. una prima opposizione che spesso si sente ripetere è quella fra un apprendimento lineare e un apprendimento circolare. il nostro tempo di studio era lineare, congeniale alla humanist studies & the digital age alberto sobrero 2.1 fall 2012 14 forma libro: come in un libro c’era un inizio e una fine, un sapere propedeutico, degli strumenti e un linguaggio di cui impossessarsi, e c’era un momento in cui si poteva dire di essere padroni di un certo argomento. il percorso era per tutti uguale e confrontabile. e anche l’organizzazione della cultura e della società procedeva per via lineare: la divisione del lavoro fra chi scriveva un libro e chi lo leggeva, fra chi insegnava e chi apprendeva, i passaggi generazionali. a un modello lineare la rete sostituisce un modello circolare e diffuso di autoapprendimento, ma prima che nella rete il tempo lineare viene meno nella società. sono cose sulle quali c’è ormai una bibliografia vastissima. e sono noti i difetti del modello di apprendimento attraverso la rete. l’apprendimento circolare richiede di correre, o per lo meno richiede di non fermarsi. l’utente della rete è onnivoro e ha fretta; a ogni incrocio bisogna scegliere, ogni volta si scoprono possibilità e strade impreviste. se provate a domandare a un vostro studente perché non ha letto questa o quell’opera di un certo peso, una delle risposte più frequenti è: “non ho tempo.” la risposta suona bene, è quella famosa del matematico galois: con la differenza che galois il giorno dopo aveva un duello, mentre per lo più il nostro studente al massimo starà preparando un microesame. ma quella dello studente è una risposta sincera. non c’è un inizio e non c’è una fine della ricerca; tutto è parte di un insieme senza confini. la ricerca potrebbe andare avanti all’infinito e dimenticare completamente il punto di partenza. la rete non dà la misura di quanto non si sa, come può capitare entrando in una biblioteca; è piuttosto una terra di mezzo fra il non sapere e il sapere. basta andare in rete! la psicologia della rete è, del resto, un po’ quella che accompagnava la nostra acquisizione di fotocopie: una volta fatte erano anche un po’ studiate! le conoscenze dei manuali (e magari i riassunti dei romanzi) sono tutte là, sempre disponibili e facilmente reperibili. la mediocrità, il carattere impersonale, la parcellizzazione, la fretta, sono caratteri connaturati alla logica della rete. gli aspetti positivi sono l’altra faccia dei difetti. da una parte il rischio di un pensiero acritico e molecolare, dall’altra la possibilità di costruirsi propri percorsi, sondare diverse opinioni, innovare, superare vecchie partizioni disciplinari, saperne più dei docenti. lo strumento della conoscenza, come dicevo, modifica non solo il modo di conoscere, ma anche il modo di pensare. si pongono subito due problemi. il primo riguarda la memoria. tutti avrete notato come i nostri studenti dimentichino presto quel che hanno studiato. il passaggio dalla memoria di lavoro, a quella a lungo termine dipende da due fattori: un adeguato tempo di esposizione allo stimolo e la capacità di elaborazione dello stesso, la possibilità di collocare il dato elaborato all’interno di un quadro di riferimento o, meglio all’interno di una storia già presente. la questione è molto più complessa: è interessante, ad esempio, notare che si memorizzano più facilmente i dati e le esperienze che si ritengono più utili, o che le esperienze e le notizie piacevoli o spiacevoli si memorizzano in maniera diversa. e questo accade anche per le nozioni, considerate più o meno interessanti. humanist studies & the digital age alberto sobrero 2.1 fall 2012 15 anche limitandoci a una presentazione generale della questione, è chiaro che una lettura veloce e frammentaria come quella della pagina in rete, ne rende difficile la memorizzazione. tanto più che ogni pagina tende a essere indipendente e autosufficiente e, anzi, per lo più si tratta di frammenti troppo piccoli e troppo numerosi perché possano essere momentaneamente depositati nella memoria di lavoro ed essere elaborati, considerando, come è noto, che la memoria a breve termine più di tanto non può contenere. gli esperimenti in questo senso sono numerosi e tutti arrivano alla stessa conclusione. durante la lettura di una pagina scritta si registra un’attività cerebrale decisamente superiore a quella registrata durante la lettura di pagine in rete, si ricorda molto di più quando si legge da un libro che quando si legge nella rete, e mentre nel primo caso si è in grado di ricostruire il contenuto della lettura nell’ordine in cui è esposto, nel secondo caso il ricordo oltre ad essere decisamente inferiore è anche del tutto disorganizzato. si tende anzi, a ricordare come quando si ricordano i sogni: ognuno ricorda a proprio modo, ma tutti ricordiamo a partire dall’ultima pagina per tentare di risalire alla prima. non posso approfondire la questione, ma è chiaro che siamo in presenza di due memorie completamente diverse, e una mente cresciuta sulla rete, facendo ricerche per la scuola, o semplicemente giocando, tende a riprodurre anche in altre occasioni lo stesso modello di conoscenza. leggere un libro diventa faticoso, specie se si tratta di un romanzo, di una storia lunga e che non può essere frammentata più di tanto. i romanzi pretendono una lettura profonda e sembrano incompatibili con la rete. ma c’è un ultimo aspetto della questione che vorrei almeno sfiorare, è l’interrogativo che si è posto aime in un recente libretto, il dono al tempo di internet. come sapete si tratta di un argomento molto trattato in antropologia: qual è il significato di un dono? perché si dona? da mauss in poi il dibattito è stato intenso. quali sono le motivazioni che spingono a contribuire allo scambio di file, di conoscenze, di competenze culturali? quali sono le motivazioni che portano a condividere, a mettere in rete gli appunti di una lezione, o a rispondere alla richiesta di aiuto sul passaggio di un testo, sulla miglior traduzione di una certa frase idiomatica, o semplicemente sull’uso di una parola? in italia non abbiamo ancora in ambito antropologico una riflessione sul rapporto fra antropologia e informatica analoga a quella che hanno i filologi, o progetti complessivi come quelli degli storici (bologna). in italia pochissimi antropologi, docenti o studenti che siano, collaborano, per esempio, a wikipedia. molto ridotta è anche la produzione di software specifici, quasi esclusivamente dedicati alla catalogazione del patrimonio culturale (bravotucci, costa). in linea di massima i siti e i portali di cattedre, dottorati, musei, riviste, come antropologie (clemente), fareantropologia (dei) o come anthropolis, sono pagine non molto ricche. e solo da poco si è assunto il mondo della rete come possibile terreno di ricerca etnografica e di riflessione antropologica (bitti, dei). il limite di queste riflessioni mi sembra quello di utilizzare troppo genericamente il termine rete, o termini come file sharing etc. bisognerebbe a mio avviso fare alcune distinzioni. anche se accettiamo una definizione di dono molto più vicina a quella di humanist studies & the digital age alberto sobrero 2.1 fall 2012 16 derrida che non a quella di mauss e quindi diciamo che lo scambio in rete è uno scambio generalizzato e allargato, un dono fatto anonimamente a una comunità anonima, senza pensare di poterne avere una qualche restituzione immediata e senza contabilizzare il dare e il ricevere, dobbiamo, tuttavia, fare alcune distinzioni in base ai contenuti scambiati e alle comunità coinvolte. distinguerei decisamente fra comunità senza confine, come nel caso di wikipedia, e comunità definite, o per interessi, o in riferimento a confini esterni. la differenza è notevole. diverso è il caso dei forum free studenteschi. prendo ad esempio il forum degli studenti del corso di laurea di antropologia di lettere alla “sapienza” di roma. quasi tutti gli studenti dichiarano di entrare nel forum, di prendere sul serio le indicazioni che vi trovano, di collaborare con loro opinioni. e questo penso capiti un po’ per tutti i corsi di laurea. è un materiale che meriterebbe una qualche attenzione. perché uno studente perde tempo (fra virgolette) a spiegare a un altro studente i sistemi fondamentali della parentela o la nozione di rappresentazione perspicua in wittgenstein? penso ad alcune risposte possibili. di certo, in primo luogo, per un bisogno di appartenenza, per il bisogno di affermare la propria presenza all’interno di un gruppo. di solito gli interventi sono seri, rispettano i principi della netiquette, raramente trovo meccanismi espliciti di competizione. ed è un bisogno di presenza tanto più grande quanto più l’istituzione universitaria è lontana e silenziosa. non ci si aspetta alcun ritorno, e non mi sembra ci sia una vera circolarità. a rispondere sono sempre un gruppo di nickname evidentemente più preparati, per i quali segnare la propria presenza competente confina in molti casi con la necessità di conferma, di autostima, e magari con un evidente e salutare narcisismo. c’è poi una seconda motivazione che mi sembra decisiva. preso nel suo complesso questo genere di scambio configura non tanto un’opposizione tra logica del mercato e logica del dono, come nel caso di wikipedia o di altre forme di condivisione p2p, quanto un’opposizione alla logica dell’istituzione in quanto tale, una sorta di alleanza tattica contro il sistema. il linguaggio, per quanto rispettoso, rivela una guerriglia semantica più vicina alle tattiche subalterne di resistenza studiate da de certeau che non a un progetto politico generale di contestazione. in qualche modo difetti e pregi della rete si riflettono nella psicologia della nuova generazione (o ne sono riflesso). sono i caratteri dei recenti movimenti studenteschi: l’assenza di grandi ideologie, l’assenza di progetti alternativi, un procedere a volte confuso, ma, al tempo stesso, la capacità di non farsi intrappolare in schemi e partiti, di inventare percorsi nuovi, l’idea di prendere possesso della città dirigendosi improvvisamente verso la periferia piuttosto che marciare verso il centro. quel che voglio dire è molto semplice: dobbiamo ripensare le forme del nostro linguaggio, più di quanto non si sia fatto fino adesso, e fare pendere la bilancia dalla parte degli aspetti positivi della rete. non è detto, ma è solo un esempio, che un romanzo di cento o cinquecento pagine vada letto solo in modo lineare: si può insegnare a smontarlo e rimontarlo, a identificare percorsi diversi, a scoprirne le parentele in altri romanzi, a humanist studies & the digital age alberto sobrero 2.1 fall 2012 17 ipotizzare altri finali. non è questa del resto, la vera natura del romanzo? quello che chiedevano di fare tanti romanzieri, da cervantes e diderot in poi? e così la lettura di un saggio può attraversare molti altri saggi, girare nella rete, arricchirsi, riempirsi di ipotesi alternative, sperimentare nuove forme di rappresentazione. e questo è forse più importante nelle nostre discipline umanistiche che non nelle discipline scientifiche. se vediamo così le cose, i problemi non sono quelli che ci tormentano da dieci anni: il rapporto fra crediti e numero di pagine, le richieste di programmi in “non più di cinque righe, con traduzione in inglese, dei risultati attesi,” o stupidaggini simili. si può portare all’esame anche un solo romanzo o un solo saggio, ma lo si può far esplodere nelle più impensate direzioni. come accade nella rete, le cento pagine possono diventare mille. si tratta, per così dire, di marcare percorsi lineari all’interno di sistemi complessi, fino a imparare a leggere l’intero romanzo proustiano, o fino a studiare le strutture elementari della parentela, insegnando il piacere di quella lettura, leggendo ogni pagina come un passaggio inatteso. 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/bunga_bunga [9 gennaio 2012]. 2 http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/bunga_bunga [9 gennaio 2012]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/bunga_bunga http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/bunga_bunga humanist studies & the digital age alberto sobrero 18 works cited aime, marco e cossetta, anna. il dono al tempo di internet. torino: einaudi, 2010. print. bateson, gregory. mente e natura. un’unità necessaria. milano: adelphi, 1984. print. bollème, geneviève, ed. la bibliothéque bleu. la littérature populaire en france du xviie au xixe siècle. paris: gallimard/julliard, 1971. print. bollème, geneviève. les almanachs populaires aux 17. et 18. siècles. essai d’histoire sociale. paris: mouton & co., 1969. print. cirese, alberto mario. “il potere del computer: come comandare a un servo che non ha paura della morte.” potere senza stato. atti del convegno. cagliari 10-11 maggio 1984. ed. carla pasquinelli. roma: editori riuniti, 1986. 163-181. print. de certeau, michel. l’invenzione del quotidiano. roma: edizioni lavoro, 2001. print. derrida, jacques. donner le temps, paris: galilée, 1991; donare il tempo. la moneta falsa. milano: raffaello cortina, 1996. print. mauss, m., 1924, “essai sur le don. forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques.” l’année sociologique, 1, pp. 30-186; saggio sul dono. forma e motivo dello scambio nelle società arcaiche. torino: einaudi, 2002. print. maturana, humberto; varela, francisco. autopoiesi e cognizione. la realizzazione del vivente. venezia: marsilio, 1985. print. mcluhan, marshall. gli strumenti del comunicare. milano: net, 2002. print. wikipedia. "bunga bunga” wikipedia, l'enciclopedia libera, 2011-2012. web. 9 gennaio 2012. humanist studies & the digital age, 5.1 (2017) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.7264/n32j698p scholarly networks and collaborative practices proceedings of the colloquium held at brown university on april 16-18, 2015 massimo riva abstract the sections “perspectives” and “interventions” of this issue of humanist studies & the digital age present a selection from the proceedings of a colloquium held at brown university in the spring of 2015. the event was hosted by the virtual humanities lab in the department of italian studies (vhl), in collaboration with the center for digital scholarship in the brown university library (cds), and dariah-italy (digital research infrastructure for the arts and the humanities). its aim was to explore the new types of scholarly output produced when scholars use digital methods to collaborate on, annotate and visualize traditional materials. introduction in the age of data mining, distant reading, topic modeling and cultural analytics, scholars and researchers in the humanities increasingly rely upon automated, algorithmbased procedures in order to parse their exponentially growing databases of digitized textual and visual resources. yet, within this deeply networked and massively interactive environment, it is crucial to preserve the expert logic of primary and secondary sources, textual stability, citations, and other apparatus, which form the heritage and legacy of humanities scholarship. digital editions, for example, must now live in the networked environment built within digital library repositories: emerging curatorial and editorial practices and the semantic act of interpretation are increasingly embedded together into the primary sources and such practices are also the conduit for training the next generation of digital humanists. in short, scholarly collaboration must problematize methodology, tools and interpretation at the same time. humanities researchers increasingly collaborate, in a laboratory mode, on shared platforms and in shared virtual environments, experimenting with open source tools often developed elsewhere, in the annotation and visualization of select corpora of primary sources. in the process, they produce new and yet unidentified typologies of scholarly objects (thoroughly embedded in library repositories) that incorporate curatorial and interpretive practices along with a new, and fully documented, technical instrumentation. this hybrid form of collaborative curation/publication is at the foundation of humanities scholarship in the digital age. in the brown colloquium, scholars from the u.s., the u.k., http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ humanist studies & the digital age riva 5.1 (2017) 6 and italy shared their ideas, diverse experience, and work-in-progress related to one or more of these aspects: new data-driven collaborative practices; the intersection of traditional scholarly methods and emerging computerized techniques; the new research infrastructure (digital library repositories and tools); the institutional framework within which computeraided practices in the humanities may thrive. the topics addressed in the colloquium also reflect the evolution of the collaborative activities conducted within the framework of the vhl since its creation in 2004 (thanks to a two-year grant from the national endowment for the humanities) by contributing scholars located in the u.s., europe (italy and the u.k.), latin america (mexico and argentina), and australia. in its original configuration, the vhl included a platform for the collaborative online editing, annotating and publishing of a variety of classic texts in italian and latin. it aimed to create an online environment in which scholars could train themselves in the new practices while attending at their editorial and scholarly work. more recently, in collaboration with the cds at the brown library, the vhl has also embraced projects focused on the development of enriched digital library collections and archives, such as the garibaldi panorama & the risorgimento archive, and the theater that was rome, both based on special collections of the brown university library. these projects, and others under consideration, are particularly focused on visualization techniques and tools, including geospatial resources. in his key-note address at the colloquium, entitled “the hathitrust research center: bringing you 4.7 billion pages of analytic opportunities!,” j. stephen downie, associate dean for research and professor at the school of information sciences of the university of illinois, and the illinois codirector of the hathitrust research center, described the unprecedented opportunities offered to scholars across disciplinary boundaries by advanced digital library infrastructures, such as that built by the hathi trust consortium. this not only provides access to an ever-growing corpus of textual data but also creates an environment in which scholars can produce, store and share their annotated datasets, according to the topics of their research, thus contributing to generate what we may call collaborative curatorial practices that go beyond data mining into the realm of data sharing and perhaps also new forms of publication. this is entirely consistent with the original inspiration of the vhl, although clearly realized on a much larger scale, which poses the question: how can relatively small-scale projects such as the vhl take advantage of large-scale infrastructures such as hathi trust? indeed, another aspect of the networked research environment in which scholars are increasingly able to collect, share and publish their data, along with their own analyses and conclusions based on those data, is the transformation of traditional forms of humanities publication, as we shall see also further on. these can be spearheaded by a synergy between large infrastructural digital library resources and highly focused, projectcentered research “environments” which, like the vhl, aim to highlight special library collections, in what could be defined a “curatorial” mode. with the dramatic increase in scope of digital resources, data-driven projects are a potentially new area of development for the vhl: in organizing this colloquium, we were particularly interested in exploring new collaborative possibilities in the area of text analysis and “distant reading,” including such emerging methodologies as topic modeling, text clustering, sentiment analysis, network analysis, but also geolocative and geospatial visualization techniques (the use of data-generated maps to parse a textual and visual corpus, humanist studies & the digital age riva 5.1 (2017) 7 for example, as in a project recently developed within the framework of the garibaldi & the risorgimento digital archive, the garibaldi resource explorer: http://library.brown.edu/cds/garibaldi/resources/fullexplorer.php). a critical overview of these emerging methodologies was presented at the colloquium by fabio ciotti, of dariah, italy (his paper could not be included in these proceedings having been already accepted for publication elsewhere). the methodologies listed above are central to the debate about data mining in, and for, the humanities and the related discussions about the “ontological statute” of humanistic data. in what is perhaps the most technical contribution to these proceedings, dino buzzetti (emeritus professor of the university of bologna and a founding member of the brown-bologna pico della mirandola project) and ernesto priani (a researcher at the universidad nacional autonoma de mexico, and also a member of the pico project) address these issues from a specific point of view: namely, how an annotated digital edition of pico della mirandola’s conclusiones nongentae (one of the ongoing projects in the vhl) could benefit from the integration of traditional editorial and publishing practices with the newly emerging computational methods. a digital edition of, and commentary on, pico’s 900 theses (as the conclusiones are also known), pico’s own critical compilation and theoretical “parsing” of hundreds of sources from all philosophical and theological textual traditions known to him, would indeed greatly benefit from the possibility of eliciting the help of automated techniques in order to reconstruct the intricate intertextual web of quotations and references often only implicitly embedded, or alluded to, in pico’s text. buzzetti and priani discuss the merits and limitations of the new text analysis and data mining methods “introduced to inspect word contexts and vocabularies, through the classification of texts, the development of ontologies, and the identification of lexical similarities.” their preliminary conclusion – “intertextuality becomes then the theoretical foundation of further digital implementations” is also the point of departure of their proposal of a topic modeling approach to the next phase of the pico editorial and publishing project. in short, “finding the sources of pico’s theses in an author’s corpus is a matter of context and intertextuality,” they write. from this point of view, they consider vector space modeling a method to capture the relative importance (or weight) of a term in a document promising. equally worth consideration is, in their opinion, the approach of the concept lab, a research project at the university of cambridge led by peter de bolla, because of its distinction between word senses and concepts: this is “particularly relevant in relation to pico’s theses, since his vocabulary, depending as it does on the need to demonstrate the genuine concordance of all philosophical positions, is not necessarily the same as that of the authors they are ascribed to.” buzzetti and priani then go on to describe an experiment conducted in collaboration with the grupo de ingeniería linguistica of the instituto de ingeniería of the unam, in which an attempt is made to locate pico’s “sixteen conclusions according to albert the great” in the latter’s corpus. the methods and tools thus tested (the cosine similarity method, the mallet, and the word2vec packages) suggest several interesting analytical steps. without delving into the technicalities addressed in the article, the benefit of a topic modeling approach consists for the authors in its integrative rather than alternative potential, in relation to more traditional scholarly methods: “distant and close reading can then meet and in defiance of the common opinion they can effectively show their complementarity.” humanist studies & the digital age riva 5.1 (2017) 8 this is particularly promising for a machine-aided annotated edition of pico’s work: “a controlled annotation language, obtained out of topic modeling and co-occurrence results, would possibly enable an intermediary course of action between manual and automated procedures, consisting for instance in a formalised annotation practice.” the last section of the article takes into consideration another set of techniques and evaluates their potential use, namely how machine learning and artificial intelligence (ai) can contribute to process annotation data through the application of probabilistic soft logic (psl). again, skipping the most technical (and analytically useful) part and jumping to their conclusions, the authors’ analysis shows “that both close and distant reading can play similar roles in respect of quantitative as opposed to qualitative, or factual as opposed to conceptual approaches, and that they can both be regarded as complementary practices.” a similar “critical” and experimental approach to emerging techniques and methodologies informs the contribution by michael papio, “geospatial visualizations for the study of boccaccio.” papio asks a very general question: what can mapmaking do to help us better understand the life and work of a medieval author such as boccaccio? this question relates both to papio’s own engagement with boccaccio’s work as a “geographer” and “topographer” in de montibus, and is not unrelated to pedagogical practices recently developed within the framework of the oldest among the vhl projects, the decameron web, that papio contributed to create, back in the late 1990s. (these practices include collaborative class exercises in the mapping of the decameron text according to geolocative coordinates such as that designed by nicole gercke: the places mentioned, or alluded to, in the text, are located onto a historical map, the fifteenth century catalan atlas, layered over google maps). in short, papio sets out to test the idea that “geospatial representations of boccaccio’s world – a few pages taken from an unfinished boccaccio atlas, so to speak – may... provide insights into additional things that had escaped our notice.” simple visualization tools such a cluster map linked to word frequency may show what we already know: for instance, that “the decameron is tightly moored to those areas its author knew from actual experience,” or that “the decameron is substantially tuscan (which will come as a shock to no one).” yet, the more “granular” our data parsing is, the more interesting are the potential analytical results: “in a collection of tales that seem to have been kept generally close to geographical areas known personally by their author, never is there mention of that handful of city blocks he knew as his own,” that is the oltrarno neighborhood around 1352. (cross-referencing these data with other data, such as for example those retrievable from the catasto and tratte databases, also part of the vhl, could enhance even further our picture of boccaccio’s florence). referring to betrand westphal (one of the driving forces of geocriticism) and his idea of the “unstable hierarchy of places” in the middle ages, papio provides very useful considerations about the best way to take critical advantage of geographical visualizations: “the idea that geographical locations were unstable may seem to us, who have google maps in our phones and a gps in our cars, to be a curious concept.” for a correct adjustment, we need first of all to be aware of the state of medieval cartography. (layering a historical map such as the catalan atlas or medieval portolani, for example, over a geopositioned google map can also provide an interesting measure of the distortion and instability of both systems). “the instability of geolocations across time and space is an especially productive notion for boccaccio studies,” papio writes, forcing us to look at the way “geopositioning” worked, in the late middle ages, based on textual traditions rather than computer-generated numeric coordinates; and making humanist studies & the digital age riva 5.1 (2017) 9 us reflect on “the benefits of using maps to reconstruct a literary reality, even one distorted by time, that existed hundreds of years earlier.” a geocritical exercise thus requires a certain degree of historical imagination. in short, as the rest of papio’s essay illustrate, it is precisely this multidimensionality that makes geocritical imagination tick: plotting or mapping boccaccio’s world not by arbitrarily superimposing our own geographical representations on it, but by retrieving the depth of his own unstable, literary “geolocative” system. “up to now -papio writes preference has been given to how geospatial approaches can open doors in literary studies; the reverse is of course just as true.” in conclusion, papio suggests, “intelligent maps based on thoughtful criteria can lead to new areas of research, or at the very least can provide geospatial paratexts that will be useful to research that is already in full swing.” again, as in the case of the pico project, it is the cross-fertilization of traditional humanistic scholarship and computational visualization techniques that seems to produce the best results. the other two contributions from the brown colloquium presented here address the crucial question posed by the institutional framework of the new research infrastructure, from two different points of view: guyda armstrong and marilyn deegan summarize in their essay the results of a two-year investigation, sponsored by the arts and humanities research council in the u.k., about emerging forms of digital publication in the humanities, focusing in particular on the “digital monograph”; john cayley (a professor of literary arts at brown university, and an award-winning author of electronic literature) reflects on the way digital repositories could, and should, become the springboard for open, “creative” collaborative practices in the arts and the humanities. let’s begin with the latter contribution, which appears here in a video format in the section “interventions” of this issue of the journal digital humanities & the digital age. the long subtitle of cayley’s presentation sums up the fundamental question he addresses: how can we persuade universities to own their responsibilities to the practice-based research that they patronize – while bringing new, fullyaccredited methodologies and infrastructures to arts and humanities scholarship? the “we” in this title-sentence refers to scholars interested not only in the opportunities offered by the digital infrastructure being built but willing to actively contribute to the designing of this infrastructure. cayley’s perspective is that of a “practitioner of digital literary arts,” interested in particular in the linguistic dimension of digital artistic practices. however, his argument applies also to humanities research more broadly conceived. with the shift toward the digital infrastructure, and the confusion which still surrounds definitions of the digital humanities, it seems that our attention as textual scholars has turned from the text to the indexing of textual resources. massive (and according to cayley “catastrophic”) restructuring of the publishing industry and unprecedented access to digitally represented (big) data, are the two main events we face, as scholars-practitioners in both the arts and humanities. the (academic) book is dead, according to cayley, “students don’t read books anymore,” and the codex exists only as an archive (of individual research). yet nothing has yet replaced the “book” as the corner stone of careers and, we may add, the main tool for sharing the results of research in the humanities (and perhaps also the non-digital “literary arts”). the sweeping nature of these statements is intentionally provocative: his contribution, cayley says, is partially a “manifesto.” his point of departure, certainly shared among those attending the colloquium is that scholars have to take active part in the “indexing” enterprise (not leaving it to google & co.) and universities must lead this effort, or better, enable scholars to lead this effort, in a participative and collaborative way. yet, this humanist studies & the digital age riva 5.1 (2017) 10 enterprise is more than “indexing” knowledge. as the digital data produced in research is feeding, or, in jargon, is being increasingly “ingested” into, universities’ repositories, scholars should be able to rely upon these repositories (rather than the “cloud,” for example) for archiving their work-in-progress: the datasets that are the equivalent of “field-notes,” drafts, compilations of annotated materials of various nature that they use in order to produce outcomes and “results” (still mostly fashioned or packaged as articles, books, etc.). this would not only guarantee against obsolescence (and dependence on market services) but would potentially change the nature of what “publication” is going to be in the future: new forms of repository-based publication will necessarily include the data collected and curated in the process of research, providing an account of both the “how” (the methodology) and “what” (the data) of a specific research. institutional policies and practices should enable and encourage this process. the future of the academic book in this changing landscape is the object of the final contribution presented here from the brown colloquium. as the authors write: “declining monograph sales, rising serials prices, funding problems, rapidly-changing new technologies, shifting policy landscapes, increasing pressure on academics to do more with less, all contribute to a sense of unease about the health of the academic book in the arts and humanities, and indeed about the health of the disciplines themselves.” in sketching out the results of the ahrc-sponsored survey, mostly centered on the u.k. but extending its reach also to north america, armstrong and deegan provide a more varied scenario than that envisioned by cayley: “new developments...may point to diverse futures for different kinds of books – they write. some of these are infrastructural and hold out promise of sustainable models; others are individual and experimental, and may point to some new and interesting possibilities. we need both, but we must bear in mind that some of the new models will not stand the test of time.” proclaiming once again the “end of books,” as a famous new york times article by the writer robert coover did already back in 1992, may be, again, premature (coover, the founder of the program in digital literary arts at brown left his position to cayley). yet, the cautionary character of the academic book of the future (abfr) report – “we have observed an enduring attachment to print that is neither sentimental nor habitual: print just happens to do some things particularly well, and will no doubt continue to do so” – may be also conditioned in turn by its specific point of view: the future of the academic book (coover’s article mostly referred to the future of storytelling). this said, it should be added that while cayley’s position is also a somewhat “militant” one, a manifesto in favor of an innovative approach to publishing methods and knowledge sharing in the humanities, the abfr provides instead a snapshot of the current state of affairs, including the results of inquiries bridging the “old” and the “new.” armstrong and deegan for example cite “the robb (2015) review of words onscreen: the fate of reading in a digital world by naomi baron” which “in a survey of over 300 university students in the u.s., japan, germany, and slovakia...found a near-universal preference for print, especially for serious reading” (which seems to straightforwardly contradict what cayley stated in his presentation). yet, these results should be probably adjusted to the relative percentage of time that the students surveyed actually spend reading books and reading online (two different kinds of reading, as we assume). the snapshot of the current state of affairs is a very useful one, however, and the necessary point of departure for any attempt to predict, or envision, a possible future. the article touches upon many aspects of the problem, including: the technological side (or humanist studies & the digital age riva 5.1 (2017) 11 platforms) available and under experimentation; the (broad) typology of academic genres which may or may not have a braver future in the new world of knowledge sharing in the humanities (digital editions, or e-journals, for example); the effect of emerging digital rhetoric on the printed page (the output may still be print but the process of researching and writing is increasingly digital); the issues of obsolescence and preservation, touched above and also cayley’s most urgent concern as an artist (the more innovative and experimental the emerging forms are, the greater the risk of obsolescence seems to be); the nature of the “enhanced monograph,” the longand single-author-form which is the cornerstone of careers in the humanities, and still the main carrier of symbolic value (with the imprint of a prestigious publisher), in the age of “open access”; and, last but not least, the economic sustainability of it all (the various private-public partnership models which make both the experimentation with new forms, and their establishment as models and standards, possible). many of these issues can be usefully considered from different points of view as well: that of the individual scholar, that of the scholarly community, that of a specific discipline, that of a specific institution (private and public universities, foundations, government agencies), that of publishers, even that of the “general audience,” the humanities community at large etc. the complexity of these points of view, combined in what is sometimes referred to as the new “eco-system” of knowledge producing and sharing in the humanities, allows us to grasp the complexity involved in envisioning the role which “the academic book of the future,” or what will eventually, possibly, replace the book, may have in it (including the ph.d. dissertation which of the academic book is often the incunabulum). the article goes on to review a number of current projects, of various nature and scale, which can provide at least a glimpse at the richness and variety of the experimentations in progress with both born-digital formats and/or the translation or hybridization of traditional scholarly outputs into the digital environment. being myself currently involved in one of the many experiments with the “digital monograph,” supported by the mellon foundation in partnership with a number of north american academic presses and university libraries, i can see both the pros and cons of this enterprise to redesign the “book” as one of many “unidentified scholarly objects” on the horizon: this is not the venue to share my own insights based on this experience. yet, i can perhaps conclude by saying that one of the fundamental issues for us today remains how to balance preservation and innovation: i mean “preservation,” in both a specific sense and in the broader sense of the transmission of scholarly forms which have proven their value in the long past, including the printed book; and innovation, in both a specific sense, and in the broader sense of the comprehensive transformation of traditional scholarly forms and the emerging of new ones more adapted to thrive in the new knowledge ecology. it could sometimes feel like a balancing act, and we can be tempted, from time to time, to tip that balance in one sense or the other, to abandon the “old” or resist the “new.” in fact, what the brown colloquium has confirmed is that the most productive attitude is an open, critical, pragmatic, and experimental one which sees “traditional” and “new” forms as cross-fertilizing and reshaping each other in a synergetic way. this has been the inspiration of the virtual humanities lab, since its creation. humanist studies & the digital age, 5.1 (2017) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.7264/n3jm2823 audioscan milano. exploring avant-garde sound practices via digital humanities serena ferrando and giorgio sancristoforo abstract audioscan milano explores the strategies and experiments in the field of sound and noise of milan’s legendary studio di fonologia musicale. a multimedia installation composed of hundreds of field recordings of the city of milan, audioscan milano provides its audience with a multisensory experience of the urban soundscape and the opportunity to interact with it digitally. the manipulation of noise and its transformation into musical sound via sophisticated electronic equipment emulates the studio’s audio techniques but also exposes the reasons behind its failure to attract a wider audience. visitors to audioscan milano expect to hear urban noise rather than musical sounds and, despite some enthusiasm around being able to mix sound objects on the map and move them around the room, they fail to appreciate the technical subtleties of the procedures behind the music. ultimately, audioscan milano constitutes an important link to italy’s musical heritage of the 1950s and 1960s and can learn from its limitations, particularly when it comes to engaging the audience to play a more active role in the auditory experience of the city. introduction audioscan milano is a multimedia interactive installation based on a large collection of sounds recorded in milan, italy. a sound mapping project, audioscan milano utilizes maxmsp to manipulate street recordings into music and arrange them on a digital map. milan, italy’s largest metropolis, is the birthplace of the studio di fonologia musicale (1954-1983), which quickly became one of the centers of the electronic music scene. its main representatives, neo-avant-gardists luciano berio (1925-2003), bruno maderna (1920-1973), and luigi nono (1924-1990), produced astounding compositions and sound experiments that contributed to the reshaping of the musical landscape of the twentieth century both in europe and the united states. alongside pierre schaeffer’s groupe de recherche de musique concrète (1951-1958) in paris and karlheinz stockhausen’s studio für elektronische musik des westdeutschen rundfunks (1951-2000) in cologne, the studio provided these composers-musicians-technicians with the new technologies, which at the time were mostly available to radio stations, they needed to push the boundaries of traditional music in ways reminiscent of luigi russolo’s noise experiments of the 1910s.1 at the core of the studio’s activity was a porous concept of music, which reflected the intention of berio, maderna, and nono to incorporate electronic and concrete music materials into their work in order to break down the ideological barriers between the french musique concrète and the german 1 see russolo’s the art of noises (1913). http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ https://vimeo.com/11548168 https://vimeo.com/11548168 https://cycling74.com/products/max/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cologne humanist studies & the digital age ferrando and sancristoforo 5.1 (2017) 109 elektronische musik.2 in fact, this approach comprised the incorporation of the urban soundscape into their compositions with the goal to generate auditory experiences of life in the metropolis that engaged the listeners and provoked a participatory response from them. also, fascinated by the soundscapes of their time, berio and maderna saw the potential offered by the electronic gear at their disposal to study the “extraordinary life of sound and its physical behavior” (mila and paccagnini 153). noise, in particular, became central, as they continued russolo’s mission to liberate and embrace it as the phonic aspect of modern life (114). electronic music therefore became their main avenue to investigate every aspect of the soundscape, including “the mechanical breathing of the big factories” and other urban noise (152, 169). audioscan milano is a homage to and a continuation of the studio’s work. it explores, analyzes, and manipulates the city’s sonic signature with the intent to elicit a participatory response from the public. audioscan milano also provides a digital approach to the studio’s modernist musical practices that can aid our understanding of its sound experiments and the theory that governed them. in fact, by adopting and developing advanced digital tools for the manipulation of sound inspired by the studio’s groundbreaking research and practice, audioscan milano can help shed light on the thought process behind each creation, enabling us to understand the mechanisms governing each piece and explore the complex relationship between the composers and their audience in order to study the reception of the studio’s work and its impact on today’s music practices. technology and the urban soundscape like russolo’s risveglio di una città (1913) and berio’s and maderna’s ritratto di città (1954), audioscan milano places the metropolis at its center and captures milan’s many different sonic layers processed by the human ear, drawing attention to the sounds and noises that we often selectively ignore. upon inviting us to embrace the “infinitely richer world of machine noises” which are enharmonic by nature so that we could “rejuvenate and enlarge the music system,” russolo created the noiseintoners to harness noise and manipulate it (russolo 62-63). with an intent that some consider not just imitative but also creative, russolo “looked forward to the time when composers would exercise absolute choice and control over the sounds that their music employed”3 (19). a true precursor of electro-acoustic music before electronics had come of age, he proclaimed, “we want to give pitches to these diverse noises, regulating them” (27). this was, at least partly, also the mission at the studio, which overcame the distinction between concrete music and electronic music in order to produce works that penetrated deeply into the city’s soundscape and brought its essence to the forefront. audioscan milano places itself at this junction of concrete and electronic music by utilizing heavily manipulated field recordings to create a sonic experience that plunges the 2 we define noise as a way of “thinking,” or a “concept” rather than a specific physical phenomenon. 3 this was not edgard varèse’s opinion: “our musical alphabet is poor and illogical ... why, italian futurists, have you slavishly reproduced only what is commonplace and boring in the bustle of our daily lives? ... music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor” (11). humanist studies & the digital age ferrando and sancristoforo 5.1 (2017) 110 listeners into the urban fabric of the city. nono celebrated “our intimate, inner, outer, environmental life [that] vibrates pulses listens variedly to the acoustic variety” and wrote about “being in the sound,” particularly the non-static sound that accompanies the “constant mobility, mutation, and transformation” of time and place that is the staple of human existence (nono 14). he also drew attention to “the very rich acoustic life inside and outside of us, selectable by limiting it, and limiting it in order to be intensely a part of it, but being able to discover, to wonder at the unknown, barely perceived,” and marveled at how “technology today can bring amazed wonder to our ears, our feelings, our knowledge” (16). digital technology today can pave the way to “knowing how to listen,” not only to traditional music, but to other sonorities as well, particularly those of the space surrounding the individual, that were central to nono (16). the disparity between composition and listeners, where the latter were often unfortunately ill-equipped to grasp its layered complexity that mirrored and interpreted that of the urban soundscape, resulted in the popular audience’s limited interest in the studio’s work. in a way, audioscan milano replicated this dynamic, which in turn highlighted the need to provide guidance to the audience as a point of entry from which to approach and recognize the value of this genre of electronic music. as for technology, the studio allowed a level of sound manipulation that was greatly inferior to that available to audioscan milano today. luigi nono’s concept of “spaces to listen to” developed with the new gear at his disposal (11). he began with simple tape manipulation whereby he controlled the speed and frequency of recorded sound, and then – as they became available on the market – he moved on to harmonizers, the halophone, the digital delay, band-pass filters, vocoders, and the sonoscope, a tool that helped him analyze sound scientifically. the manipulation of sound in real time by way of the latest technology allowed nono to achieve a so-called “mobile sound,” or a non-static sound that was not based on specific scales and that would capture the experience of the movement of sound in time and space (16). an example of this concept is nono’s la fabbrica illuminata (1964), which overlays recorded and heavily manipulated machine sounds and workers’ voices in a steel factory with a soprano singing. nono and his fellow neo-avant-garde composers working at the studio aimed at capturing the intattezza or wholeness of urban reality (guglielmi 48). they worked within a poetics of chaos, completely free of patterns: no communication was real or possible, and language and music could only represent disorder without offering an interpretation of it (49). since everything was fluid, nothing was permanent, the categories of sound, noise, and music were blurred and spilled into one another just as everything and everyone converged, overlapped, crashed, and existed within the aural fabric of the metropolis, the composers had no compelling reason to provide a conceptual framework or listening instructions to the audience. the principle governing the fruition of their music was therefore the unmediated absorption of the sounds along with the capacity to discern its multilayers. for this reason, theoretical writings by the authors of the studio’s electronic music experiments are scarce, and a curatorial figure is entirely missing. the question audioscan milano can answer about the studio’s sound experiments is whether technology can help us uncover the complexity behind the music and serve as that needed curatorial figure. technological music requires a technological study, and audioscan milano’s digital tools, which are a logical continuation of those utilized by the studio, can help us understand the intentions and the concepts behind its compositions and sound experiments. humanist studies & the digital age ferrando and sancristoforo 5.1 (2017) 111 audioscan milano audioscan milano was conceived and realized in 2009 by giorgio sancristoforo and giuseppe cordaro as an interactive audiovisual installation and live performance centered around the noise of milan and its unique soundprint. commissioned by agon acustica informatica musica (a center for music experimentation, production, and research founded in 1990 by luca francesconi with azio corghi, mimma guastoni, mauro bonifacio, mario pascucci, pietro pirelli and hubert westkemper), the project was co-funded by fondazione cariplo, regione lombardia and the city of milan, and exhibited at palazzo reale in milan and at the italian pavilion at the shanghai world expo in 2010. this project fits in the tradition and legacy of the milanese avantgarde and its long-standing relationship with urban noise, and it also takes inspiration from canadian musicologist murray r. schafer’s seminal work4 on soundscapes: “what always strikes me is how little attention people pay to the sound of the environment in which they live, when it should be obvious to anyone how relevant it is in terms of their quality of life,” says sancristoforo (mosca). audioscan milano is also a homage to rai’s (radiotelevisione italiana, italy's public national broadcaster) studio di fonologia musicale. the studio, located in a building designed by italian architect giò ponti in the noisy and traffic-jammed corso sempione in milan, was one of the best equipped electronic music studios of the 1950s and 1960s. there, physicist alfredo lietti and sound technician marino zuccheri collaborated with and assisted maderna and berio at the studio, which also hosted a great number of late avant-garde composers such as angelo paccagnini, john cage, henry pousseur, niccolò castiglioni, aldo clementi, franco donatoni, giacomo manzoni, and armando gentilucci. audioscan milano also aimed to utilize the soundscape method theorized by schafer, and fuse the tradition of the italian avant-garde with the scientific and musicological approach of schafer’s soundscape analysis and preservation. objectives both risveglio di una città and ritratto di città create music out of urban noises. while russolo adopted a similar approach to the symphonic poem’s technique in which acoustic instruments imitate common noise, and berio and maderna used found sounds and electronic tonalities as a substrate for their radio-poems, audioscan milano applied a scientific and ecological approach to collecting and manipulating sound materials. the project had two main goals that entailed elevating noise to art and controlling it. the first goal was to build a database of the city’s sounds that would be accessible to the public. the second was to transform those sounds (which consisted mostly of sound pollution generated by today’s technological society) and “distillate” them until they were purified into musical tones (as per hermann von helmholtz’s interpretation in die lehre von den tonempfindungen als physiologische grundlage für die theorie der musik (1863). these tones would then be employed to compose a type of music that was not experimental, but popular, and enjoyable by the younger generations. it was, in a way, a recycling operation by which a waste product was converted into something else, not different from the recycling of plastic bottles and other disposable materials 4 murray r. schafer. the soundscape: our sonic environment and the tuning of the world (1977). all translations are by ferrando. humanist studies & the digital age ferrando and sancristoforo 5.1 (2017) 112 that contaminate the planet (sasso). in sancristoforo’s words, “we created music from the scraps of our society” (sancristoforo 39). work structure and phases the work involved in audioscan milano was divided into two different phases that relied on digital technologies for recording, processing, and manipulating sound. the first three months were spent capturing and measuring the sound of 1,580 streets of milan (namely, all of the streets and squares comprised within the outer ring road). with the aid of seven students from laboratorio di informatica musicale dell’università statale di milano, sancristoforo recorded and measured 2 minutes of sound at each location every day during rush hour between 8 and 10am from monday through friday. in order to achieve perfect coherence in data and sound, sancristoforo used handheld phonometers and digital recorders of the last generation. the 50 hours of recording of downtown milan they obtained provide a precise sample of the city’s soundscape through the workday. the following four months of work required the intense labor and technical prowess of early electronic music composers, and yielded two different outcomes (sasso). using maxmsp and flash, sancristoforo and his collaborators programmed an interactive map of the city that was made available to the public on a 40-inch touchscreen located in the prestigious palazzo reale in milan in the summer of 2010. the installation was set in a completely dark room of the palazzo and included, besides the touchscreen, a four-channel d&b pa system, and two laptops, which drove the map and sounds, and projected onto the screen real time sonograms with street names and relative dba measurements. the multimedia and multisensory interface of the installation allowed for a spatial (thus enhanced) perception of sound and provided an augmented experience of the sound matter (sancristoforo 28-29). the second outcome consisted of a one-hour musical performance of ambient music (kindly labelled by a fellow composer as “a musical lexicon very close to the taste of today’s audience”) that was held in 2010 at palazzo del ghiaccio in milan as the opening show for ben frost’s live act.5 the “distillation,” or sound design, was a challenging and time-consuming process. the main goal was to perform “the alchemy of noise transmuted into music” by which literally “everything is transformed. nothing is like it was before. airplanes become microscopic percussions, passing cars turn into tin pianos and rubbery basses, light hums, and aquatic delusions. brakes and exhaust pipes sound like tidal waves of ever so light strings” (sancristoforo 39). by this process, ambient sound was manipulated in such a way that “it [was] no longer possible to recognize the matrix, the starting sound” (mosca). to accomplish this, sancristoforo and cordaro built and operated a tool called translator within maxmsp that consisted of a bank of 46 harmonically-related resonating band-pass filters with a high q factor.6 each filter had an output with an adjustable gain, so that by adjusting each filter’s gain it was possible to sculpt a sound using a technique very close to additive synthesis. the process of creating a single note and timbre was repeated 24 times in order to 5 visit http://ethermachines.com/ for more information about ben frost’s experimental electronic music. 6 the q factor is the ratio of the resonant frequency and the bandwidth of the filter. humanist studies & the digital age ferrando and sancristoforo 5.1 (2017) 113 produce a two-octave sample bank, which was then imported into an ableton live sampler and further processed with filters, reverbs, delays, and amplitude envelopes before it was sequenced for the performance.7 this technique allowed sancrisforo and cordaro to build approximately 50 different instruments ranging from kick drums to pianos, basses, strings, and synthesizers. the filtering process allowed them to use the aleatory components of the sound sources as a creative tool. the sound of a piano, for instance, did not remain static. the random amplitude fluctuations of the spectrum in the original sounds, once filtered, returned ever-changing timbres that presented peculiar aural characteristics that are impossible to replicate via conventional synthesizers or find in sound libraries. gleetchlab, a modular sound workstation with real-time processing capabilities, was also used to produce ambient sounds (sasso). the sounds thus obtained through these various techniques and types of software were ultimately looped and orchestrated in a musical piece that encompasses and features the wide spectrum of milan’s sounds (sasso). unexpected results and considerations while the sound design process was exhilarating, it was extremely difficult to convey to the audience the reasons and the techniques behind the transfiguration of city noise into musical sounds during the communication phase of audioscan milano.8 the majority of the journalists and the people in attendance expected to hear urban noises rather than musical sounds. given the complexity of the sound design involved, the methods that were used and the meaning of this form of sound ecology by means of recycling remained rather obscure to the general audience. the successful part of the project, instead, came from the interactive installation, which included a portion of the music performance that was held at palazzo del ghiaccio. on a simple xy mixer, visitors could mix the sound objects and move them around the room. they loved to explore all the city sounds, usually starting with the sounds from their street, and then lingering on either the most natural or the most peculiar sounds, which ranged from frogs croaking, to water dripping, the voices of street market crowds, birds singing, and the performances of street musicians. the partial failure of audioscan milano of drawing the audience in revealed one of the reasons why the studio di fonologia di milano failed to gain support among non-experts, and reflects an issue many artists involved in the so-called “contemporary music scene” often face. first, the audience is generally not concerned with how complex the mental processes behind a sound are, especially when those sounds are very familiar. for example, it is unimportant to them whether the sound of a piano is obtained from a real piano or is a simulation of the instrument via a complex method of sound synthesis. an untrained ear cannot distinguish between the two, which means that, in other words, the medium cannot be the message. second, the twenty-first-century audience looks for interaction and personal engagement. concerts are no longer “contemporary.” we must always take into consideration that we live in the age of portable digital devices. today’s listeners are looking for a different form of musical entertainment in part because of what we sometimes cynically call the “game effect.” participation, involvement surround sound, and even virtual reality are a game changing factor. electronic music, especially when it is made without the aid of physical 7 it is interesting to note that, as sasso points out, complex daws such as ableton live and propellerhead’s reason have evolved from the science of modular synthesizers. 8 the process ultimately consisted of “extracting data from noise” in order to capture the “sound of contemporaneity” (sancristoforo 28, 38). https://www.ableton.com/en/live/ http://www.giorgiosancristoforo.net/softwares/gleetchlab-4/ https://www.propellerheads.se/en/reason humanist studies & the digital age ferrando and sancristoforo 5.1 (2017) 114 human gestures – which is typical of the traditional acoustic and electric instrumental practice – suffers from a lack of theatrical effect, which is the reason why popular electronic music acts require over-the-top spectacles of light shows. the audience expects an “experience,” and composers and performers need to focus as much on the experience factor as they do on sounds and musical form. third, while a scientific approach to the soundscape can exhilarate a musicologist, the audience has different needs. in many cases, a scientific mapping technique does not yield a great number of interesting aural results. the soundscape author must then be very selective and willing to sacrifice a bit of coherence. mapping an entire city is not only time consuming, but probably also pointless. audioscan milano would have discovered more interesting sounds by going into private homes, working places, and public structures during different hours of the day. audioscan milano both succeeded and failed to answer several questions about noise: what is noise? how does our society generate noise? how does noise affect us, and where and when are we most exposed to it? what is the quality of life in the urban environment? while a cultural definition of noise can arise again, we also face the striking reality of noise as a concrete and very tangible form of pollution. each of the acousticians, sociologists, art curators, and software experts that were consulted for sancristoforo's book version of audioscan milano had a different and interesting point of view that had not been taken into consideration. audioscan milano also served as a precious link to our musical heritage, a lesser-known period of our history. our modern tools and techniques can help us understand better italy’s avant-garde music and its practices, and today, much more than in the past, the audience is able to understand it as well. people are no longer scandalized by noise in music. they are more open-minded and curious, but we should not forget the most important factor: how we formalize a musical experience. the battle between musical sound and noise is a relic of the nineteenth century, and what matters now is how we involve people and how we make them participate. the listener is no longer a passive entity. works cited galante, francesco and sani, nicola. musica espansa, percorsi elettroacustici di fine millennio. milano: ricordi, 2000. print guglielmi, angelo. avanguardia e sperimentalismo. milano: feltrinelli, 1964. print. helmholtz, hermann von. die lehre von den tonempfindungen als physiologische grundlage für die theorie der musik, frankfurt: minerva verlag, 1981 [1863]. print. mila, massino and paccagnini, angelo. “la musica d’oggi tra suono e rumore. origini e sviluppo della musica elettroacustica (1971-1972).” in c’erano una volta nove oscillatori... lo studio di fonologia della rai di milano nello sviluppo della nuova musica in italia, edited by paolo donati and ettore pacetti, roma: rai radiotelevisione italiana, 2002, pp. 134-201. print. mosca, simone. “il canto della città. via per via, musica dai decible di troppo.” la repubblica. venerdì 29 gennaio 2010. print. humanist studies & the digital age ferrando and sancristoforo 5.1 (2017) 115 nono, luigi. “verso prometeo. frammenti di diari.” in verso prometeo, edited by massimo cacciari, milano: ricordi, 1984, pp. 7-16. print. pagliarani, elio. la ragazza carla. milano: mondadori, 1962. print. prieberg, fred k. musica ex machina. torino: einaudi 1963. print. russolo, luigi, the art of noises. new york: pendragon press, 1986. print. sancristoforo, giorgio. audioscan milano, the sound of the city. milano: postmediabooks, 2010. print. sasso, len. “project audioscan: transforming city noise into music.” http://www.giorgiosancristoforo.net/2013/01/03/project-audioscan-transforming-citynoise-into-music/ accessed 3 october 2017. schafer, r. murray. the soundscape: our sonic environment and the tuning of the world. rochester, vt: destiny books, 1977. print. varèse, edgard and wen-chung, chou. “the liberation of sound.” perspectives of new music. vol. 5, no. 1 (autumn winter, 1966), pp. 11-19. print. http://www.giorgiosancristoforo.net/2013/01/03/project-audioscan-transforming-city-noise-into-music/ http://www.giorgiosancristoforo.net/2013/01/03/project-audioscan-transforming-city-noise-into-music/ for a study of the reception of the canzoniere in the "petrarch project" humanist studies & the digital age, 1.1 (2011) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.1.1.1096 180 for a study of the reception of the canzoniere in the “petrarch project” giorgio forni, university of messina abstract: this article presents a research project developed by a group of scholars from different italian universities; they plan to help construct the hypertext configuration of the petrarch project by attempting a first collective research on the fortunes of a single poem of the rerum vulgarium fragmenta (rvf), sonnet 35, “solo et pensoso i più deserti campi.” the ultimate aim of this mosaic work is to produce a synthetic, but integral, investigation of the fortunes and poetic interpretations of the text. finally, the article discusses the new perspectives opened by the hypertext approach to the study of the reception of the rvf. for this reason, this group of scholars extends an invitation to other researchers to collaborate in creating the map of the reception of sonnet 35 and other poems from petrarch's canzoniere. i don’t think there is any need to dwell on the fact that, even in literary studies, the extraordinary quantity of information available through the web and digital technologies provides the chance of experimenting with organisations and constructions of meanings. otherwise the wealth of textual data could turn into a substantial and meaningless chaos. we therefore cannot fail to praise the “petrarch project,” begun by the university of oregon, which reminds us of the opportunity in today’s new digital technologies for experimenting with new investigative methods and broader, coordinated research projects. the structure of the “petrarch project,” based on the individual poems of the canzoniere, leads us to reconsider the study of the reception of a macrotext, no longer as a unitary “book of rhymes,” but by considering the fate of its discontinuous elements. the “petrarch project” website, starting from every single text, will allow the construction of a network of references and studies: from the reproduction of petrarch’s manuscripts to the ancient commentaries, from the paraphrases to the bibliography of the individual texts, from the musical executions to the translations. a group of scholars from the department of italian studies of the university of bologna has begun, based on the configuration of the website, a first collective research on the fortunes of a single poem: sonnet 35, “solo et pensoso i più deserti campi.” each member of the group will identify a significant episode of reception in poetic rewritings from the fourteenth century to contemporary poetic adaptations. the ultimate aim of this mosaic work is to produce a synthetic, but integral, investigation of the fortunes and poetic interpretations of the text. we extend an invitation to other researchers to apply a similar mapping work to various other poems of petrarch’s canzoniere. http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ humanist studies & the digital age giorgio forni 1.1 winter 2011 181 what does significant episode of reception mean? by this we mean a cycle of historical experiences that share a common denominator or, better, a common interpretative stance. we believe that we can identify three cases: 1. a homogeneous reception segment: a period of time in which most readers share the same interpretation or analytic approach to the text 2. a collection of antagonistic interpretations in the same historical time: a competing reception 3. a lack of interest or a moving away from the text in a specific chronological period even a non-existent or weak or parodic reception is worthy of investigation as, once the reception of the canzoniere has been mapped, we will be able to see the gaps and the texts that count and those that have been marginalized across the various periods and cultures as well as what the various historical interpretations of the canzoniere have focused on. this will undoubtedly be useful to gain a better understanding of the semantic machine of the macrotext. first, we must distinguish the possible levels or poles of reception, including the thematic and the stylistic that perhaps require different investigative criteria. on the one hand, we must examine a set of significant microunits that cut across the boundaries of literary genres and their varied evolutionary lines; on the other, we must bear in mind the specific formal institutions of lyrical writing which are the origins of the modern poetical self. let’s try and examine three cases related to “solo et pensoso.” solitude / flight solo et pensoso i più deserti campi vo mesurando a passi tardi et lenti, et gli occhi porto per fuggire intenti ove vestigio human la rena stampi. (petrarca, canzoniere, 35, 1-4; see text 1 in appendix) undoubtedly the motif of rural solitude found a long term development in the bucolic genre of the late fifteenth century until the arcadian eighteenth century, as the idealised disguise for the separate nature of the court or literary society. in its first expression—the collection of the bucoliche elegantissime printed in florence by antonio miscomini in 1482, the pastorale by boiardo, the arcadia by sannazaro—the pastoral eclogue drew almost exclusively on classical models: certainly not petrarch, but rather virgil, theocritus, moschus, claudian, calpurnius, and nemesianus. however, in the conflictual and tormented first part of the sixteenth century the relationship between rural solitude and inner dialogue that we find in “solo et pensoso” gathers prominence also in the pastoral genre, defining, in terms of themes, a double wish to isolate oneself: either in the idyllicloving shelter of the court (static motif of solitude: line 1, “solo et pensoso”) or beyond the disorders of history and the fights for power (dynamic motif of the escape: line 3, “per fuggire”). therefore the petrarchan sonnet provides material for the introductory setting of humanist studies & the digital age giorgio forni 1.1 winter 2011 182 eclogues, woodland stanzas, silves and pastoral poems in two long-lasting methods that are worth examining separately. let’s limit ourselves to a few representative examples. in introducing the shepherd’s lament, the portrayal of solitude drawn from “solo et pensoso” can be combined with absolute immobility and with resting the tired body against a “trunk” or a “stick,” such as the beginning of the aristeo by girolamo muzio which depicts alfonso d’avalos, marquis of vasto, in a pastoral setting: il pastor aristeo pensoso e solo appoggiato si stava al duro tronco d’un faggio antico in solitaria piaggia; e per quel che di fuor porgea la fronte scorger ben si potea che ’l suo pensiero era tutto lontan d’ogni allegrezza. (muzio, aristeo, 1-6) the same applies for another courtly eclogue, metauro, by bernardino baldi: “quel pastor che colà pensoso e solo / sovra il curvo baston tutto s’appoggia, / montan mi sembra” (baldi 172). this happens again in talia by tullia d’aragona, where the shepherd does not walk but sits on the grass, “in sé raccolto, immobile e pensoso” (aragona 155). at the most, the protagonist’s movement is no longer directed toward fleeing (“fuggire”) but it rather becomes an “intorno,” wandering motion, vague and indefinite like that in the aminta by berardino rota: “aminta, ove ne vai solo e dolente, / di lagrime bagnando il lito intorno / ove vestigio uman nullo si vede?” (rota 130). it is a solitude enclosed in a confined place that, however, embraces not only the innermost lament, but also the conversation between shepherds, with an invitation to socialise the lyrical words that use even vaguely ironic allusions to the “fuggire” of “solo et pensoso,” as in the i due pellegrini eclogue by luigi tansillo, where petrarch’s “vo mesurando” becomes “vo smarrito”: già si raddoppia il dì ch’io vo smarrito, mercé del piè che mi conduce in via dove vestigio uman trovo scolpito. sapessi almen dove mi vada o sia! ecco un che va solingo e fuor di strada: forse, di me pietoso, il ciel l’invia. … chiunque sei, del loco o peregrino, tu che il piè movi sì pensoso e vago, quel che cerchi t’apporti il tuo destino. (tansillo, i due pellegrini, 1-12; see text 2) on the other hand, the immobility of the pensive and solitary lover imposes itself as the stereotype also in renaissance chivalric poems: from ariosto’s sacripante who, almost “cangiato in insensibil pietra,” remains “pensoso più d’un’ora a capo basso” (orlando furioso i, 40), to the rinaldo created by the young torquato tasso, who “sta pensoso e muto, / e come sia di pietra immobil resta” (rinaldo ix, 88). humanist studies & the digital age giorgio forni 1.1 winter 2011 183 but sonnet 35 from the canzoniere portrays a poet distancing himself from society (“vestigio human” 35, 4; “le genti” 35, 6) with the dynamic motion of “fleeing”: pensive solitude can therefore become characteristic of a necessary autonomy of judgement of the well-educated gentleman and even an allusive distancing oneself from the oppressive world of the court and from intellectual, political, or religious conformism. for example, in the silve by antonio fileremo fregoso the reference to “solo et pensoso” starts a lament against “vivere a la moderna” because at court “probità sincera” is not adequately rewarded: solo e pensoso io passegiava un giorno per un’ombrosa e solitaria via, ascoso e ancor temendo d’alcun scorno; e discorrendo con la fantasia, pensava a la cagion de’ mei gran danni, se da me nasce o da la sorte ria. (“de la probità,” 1-6) in the orbecche tragedy by giovan battista giraldi cinzio the wooded and uninhabited space seems like a possible escape from a barbaric court and a corrupt and sinister authority: oh perché ne’ rifei monti non sono più tosto nato, o tra le tigri ircane ne gli ermi boschi e ne’ più alpestri campi, ove vestigio uman non si vedesse, che qui dove i’ son nato e son nodrito, qui dove più d’ogn’aspra fiera crudi gli uomini si ritrovano? (giraldi cinzio 389, iv 1-7) in the eighteenth-century eclogues by gian vincenzo gravina the “fleeing” theme still illustrates the inner independence of the intellectual: “qual novello desio lungi ti mena / da ninfe e da pastor, fuggendo il loco / ove vestigio uman segni l’arena?” (in quondam 61). it is no accident that the “passi tardi et lenti” of “solo et pensoso” appear between the lines of the most famous escape of renaissance italian literature: “pensosa” erminia’s solitary and, in other words, anti-courtesan escape among the shepherds in torquato tasso’s gerusalemme liberata: “tarda i passi” (vi, 82), “move lenti i passi” (vi, 93), “là s’indrizza a passi lenti” (vii, 6). by separating the petrarchan text into thematic microunits, it will be easier to explore the multi-faceted labyrinth of the reception and define homogenous segments in even long chronological periods of time (case 1, as defined above). the conflict of the petrarchist styles on a stylistic level it is better to examine the whole text, comparing it to its different versions in the lyrical genre; this mainly consists of taking a census of the rewritings and differences of the stylistic choices. let’s once again examine sixteenth-century examples related to “solo et pensoso.” humanist studies & the digital age giorgio forni 1.1 winter 2011 184 perhaps it was inevitable that the worldly code of renaissance petrarchism would first of all refer to the wilder and more solitary petrarch. it should come as no surprise that “solo et pensoso” had a primary role in the early poetic apprenticeship of pietro bembo, the theorist of italian vernacular classicism and the exclusive imitation of the canzoniere: one of his very first sonnets, before 1500, “solingo augello, se piangendo vai” (see text 3) is in fact a mosaic of petrarchan elements under the dominant mark of the rerum vulgarium fragmenta 35 (previously quoted as canzoniere 35, henceforth as rvf 35), not only for the opening “solingo,” but most of all for the tercets that reformulate the opening of “solo et pensoso: rvf 35, lines 1-3: solo et pensoso i più deserti campi vo mesurando a passi tardi et lenti, et gli occhi porto … (petrarca 190; see text 1) bembo, rime 48, lines 10-12: e nudo e grave e solo e peregrino vo misurando i campi e le mie pene. gli occhi bagnati porto … (bembo 546; see text 3) the importance of the experience is revealed by the echoes of “solo et pensoso” in the first book of the asolani—for example, “d’erma rivera i più deserti lidi / m’insegna amor” (bembo 372)—and the expansion of “solingo augello, se piangendo vai” from sonnet to canzone in the asolani of 1505, until the retrieval of both texts in the rime from 1530. both the sonnet and the canzone document the fundamental nature of the experience: “vo misurando i campi e le mie pene” (bembo, rime 48, 11) and “vo misurando i poggi e le mie pene” (bembo, rime 56, 16). however bembo’s rewriting, inaccurate compared to the model, outlines a socialising overturning of the petrarchan solitude and a movement towards the other unhappy lovers: “i’ fuggo indi, ove sia / chi mi conforte ad altro, ch’a trar guai.” these verses are purposefully extremely tormented with the variants “fuggo ove che sia,” “ovunque sia,” and “ove alcun sia.” so, although the imitation of the rvf 35 is placed in the tercet, the new text gives relevance to the “inseme” canto and the figurative rendering of the lyrical scene introducing the meeting with the bird, following the example of rvf 311 and 353. similarly, the uniform rhythm of the petrarchan sonnet (“solo et pensoso–i più deserti campi / vo mesurando–a passi tardi et lenti”) is matched by bembo’s more agitated and pathetic attack which links in a broader syntactic turn the thematic antithesis of “solingo” and “meco.” the aristocratic and solitary style of the lyrical abstraction was about to become the gentlemen’s dialogic instrument. but it is precisely bembo’s multifaceted and problematic imitation that renders “solo et pensoso” the touchstone text for those renaissance poets who wanted to attempt a personal interpretation of the canzoniere. in april 1526 bernardo tasso sent count claudio rangoni the sonnet “fuggo, signor, ove l’arena stampi” (lettere inedite 8; see text 4) in praise of ginevra malatesta (“l’arbor mio bel” of line 4 is in fact the ginepro). the revival of petrarch’s “ove vestigio human la rena stampi,” in the broken line of “ove l’arena stampi / vestigio uman” (lines 1-2), already documents a more vigorous striving for psychological chiaroscuro, between the “accesi lampi” of the beloved and the “desir pigro e restio” of the lover. set in contrast with the humanist studies & the digital age giorgio forni 1.1 winter 2011 185 exterior situation—“ma non però...” (line 2), “suo mal grado” (line 6), “né però...” (line 8)— the introspective intention defines a more allegorical rather than real landscape and it aims for a representation of the poetical self, somewhere between impulse and fall, between fervour and torpor, far removed from the classic composure of the image found in bembo’s sonnet. here we find a pursuit of a style modelled on petrarch, but more modest and colloquial, right from the opening vocative that relativises the reason for fleeing from men with more immediacy: “fuggo, signor...”. even if bernardo tasso’s is simply an extemporary experiment, subsequently not included in the collection of the amori, his attempt to place side by side external actions (“i più secreti e solitarii campi / cerco solingo”) and inner feelings (“invio / il desir a virtù pigro e restio”) can be found in a more exhaustive way in a sonnet by gian giorgio trìssino published in the rime from 1529, “quanto ognior penso, più la mente ingombra” (99; see text 5), that from “fuggo, signor” also takes the ombra: ingombra rhyme. in 1529 trìssino published simultaneously a dialogue on the italian language called the castellano, a first part of the poetica, and the elegant volume of the rime, in order to contrast on various levels bembo’s petrarchan exclusivism, extending the “regola universalissima” of the imitation to an eclectic and not hierarchic repertory of “buoni autori” of all ages, from pindar to horace and the stil novo poets. considering the variety of poetical selections, it will come as no surprise that in trìssino’s sonnet, as in bembo’s, the imitation of “solo et pensoso” is revealed fully only in the tercets’ openings. if bembo’s opening focused only on “solo-solingo,” trìssino opts for “pensoso-quanto ognior penso,” developing an analysis of the melancholy of love that makes use of the petrarchan vocabulary (apart from “intolerabil”), but to outline a stage of the pre-petrarchan poetical self that is spatialized (“giù,” “profondo,” “mena”) and measurable (“quanto... più...”). after all, even the metaphor of the thoughts weighing on the heart is more in the stil novo style than petrarch: “questa pesanza ch’è nel cor discesa” (cavalcanti, rime x, 13 503). this is an example of an open petrarchism, subtly compositional, even adept at overturning the phenomenology of love canonized by petrarch. meanwhile, in the libro primo degli amori published in 1531 bernardo tasso presented a different rewriting of rvf 35: “solo e pensoso i miei passati affanni” (rime 75; see text 6). it is already quite revealing that bembo and trìssino, in stirring the comparative attention of the reader, find the imitation in the body of the sonnet, while bernardo tasso focuses on the incipit, making it easier to recognise the underlying model to stress the stylistic difference. therefore the new rewriting becomes an almost singable piece, constructed on a melodic play of repetitions (for example: “affanni” in rhyme in lines 1 and 5; “sempre lagrimando” and “sempre sospirando” in rhyme in lines 3 and 6; the grammatical rhyme in “–ando” multiplied in lines 6-7 by the series “sempre sospirando, / mercé gridando, lagrimando, amando”). it is a way of making the short measure of the sonnet not so much an imagemonad defined by a style of arduous elegance like bembo’s, but a more natural and sentimental poetical dialogue and lyrical meditation, in line with an ideal of sprezzatura, of negligentia diligens defined in those years in the cortegiano by baldassarre castiglione. humanist studies & the digital age giorgio forni 1.1 winter 2011 186 even without producing further examples, it seems obvious that the different stylistic choices emerge more evidently by taking a census and comparing the single lyrical rewritings of the same text in a similar historical context (case 2). the multidimensional aspect of a website will allow for the inclusion of every significant rewriting, with a brief critical note. on the boundary of the ages studying the reception of a single poem of the canzoniere will also allow us to verify and investigate, on a smaller scale, the great articulations of literary history and geography. let’s consider, for example, another historical context where “solo et pensoso” becomes a relevant text of the petrarchan book of rhymes: the passage from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, from the neoclassical sublime to the romantic restlessness, from alfieri to foscolo. there are multiple rewritings, including poetry and prose: the thematic refrains, even in the canonical metre of the sonnet, tend in fact to break petrarch’s linear and meditative rhythm. according to mario fubini, alfieri broke the unity of the petrarchan verse by rewriting a calm beginning such as “solo et pensoso i più deserti campi” in a cadence broken and distended by hyperbaton and enjambment: “solo, fra i mesti miei pensieri, in riva / al mar...” (alfieri rime 1154; see text 7). but this could also apply to foscolo’s sonnetself-portrait (“mesto i più giorni e solo, ognor pensoso”) (poesie 71, 10) and even certain pages of the ultime lettere di jacopo ortis (364; see text 10). in fact there is an ideal continuity from alfieri’s sonnet “solo, fra i mesti miei pensieri” to the sonnet by the young foscolo “quando la terra è d’ombre ricoverta” from 1797, “torno dove la spiaggia è più deserta / solingo a ragionar con la mia speme” (poesie, 303, 5-6; see text 9), to the pages of the ortis, until the portrait of foscolo in the epistola sui sepolcri by giovanni torti, “ahi! chi vegg’io / solo e pensoso e così fiero in vista / misurar queste arene?” (torti, 25). and yet it is rvf 35—and in particular the antithesis between “fuor” and “dentro” of line 8—that perhaps allows us to draw a line between one period and the next, between two contiguous, and yet different, cultural systems. quite clearly petrarch’s success between the late eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century is linked to the exceptional reader jean-jacques rousseau and his keen sense of the bitter and inhospitable landscape, as the interlocutor of the sincere and impassioned man, as “toutes les grandes passions se forment dans la solitude” (nouvelle héloïse ii, 105; nouvelle héloïse i, 33). “solo et pensoso” not only resurfaces as a title, les rêveries du promeneur solitaire, but the entire nouvelle héloïse is pervaded with petrarchan rewritings—with deserted and wild landscapes in which the lover finds in his surroundings an image of his own desolate and melancholic soul that consoles him of his inner anxiety. here is an example perfectly balanced between interior and exterior: dans les violens transports qui m’agitent, je ne saurois demeurer en place; je cours, je monte avec ardeur, je m’élance sur les rochers; je parcours à grands pas tous les environs, et trouve par tout dans les objets la même horreur qui regne au dedans de moi. on n’apperçoit humanist studies & the digital age giorgio forni 1.1 winter 2011 187 plus de verdure, l’herbe est jaune et flétrie, les arbres sont dépouillés, le séchard et la froide bise entassent la neige et les glaces, et toute la nature est morte à mes yeux, comme l’espérance au fond de mon cœur. (nouvelle héloïse ii, 90; text 12). but in rousseau we find most of all the sentimental myths of nature and the “camminatore solitario”: inaccessible peaks, shadowy forests, rushing torrents, and boundless seas. also in alfieri’s sonnet 135 (text 7) the emphasis is placed on the undefined and sublime landscape of the stormy sea (petrarch’s “i più deserti campi” and “la rena” become an “ermo lido” pounded by “onde irate in suon feroce”) and it is a scene that consoles the lover with a “dolce oblio” of himself until it calms every “affanno” (lines 9-11). the situation is no different in another sonnet by alfieri inspired by “solo et pensoso,” “là dove muta solitaria dura”: “a passo lento, per irta salita, / mesto vo...” (alfieri, 1146; see text 8, lines 3-4). the predilection for rugged and boundless landscapes will appear once again in the pages of the vita scritta da esso: “immense selve, laghi, e dirupi,” “vasti deserti,” “solitudini immense,” “orrido mare,” “vasto indefinibile silenzio” (alfieri, 80, 102, 196, 82 and 83). however, the sonnet by the young foscolo “quando la terra è d’ombre ricoverta” (text 9) already performs a minimal but decisive change: now the landscape is a quiet lunar night scene that does not console the “piaga aperta” in the “cuore.” the image of solitary wondering “fra le ombre pacifiche della notte” is of a poetical self that does not find in natural objects a completed image of himself and a full harmony between landscape and “cuore.” the emphasis now falls on the “sublime” and “errante” inner life that does not find even momentary consolation from the surroundings, like in the petrarchan pages of the ortis: oh! diss’ella, con quel dolce entusiasmo tutto suo, credi tu che il petrarca non abbia anch’egli visitato sovente queste solitudini sospirando fra le ombre pacifiche della notte la sua perduta amica? quando leggo i suoi versi io me lo dipingo qui– malinconico–errante–appoggiato al tronco di un albero, pascersi de’ suoi mesti pensieri, e volgersi al cielo cercando con gli occhi lagrimosi la beltà immortale di laura. (ortis 364; see text 10) that this, already romantic, experience takes place under the petrarchan influence of “solo et pensoso” can also be confirmed by foscolo’s letter to pietro borsieri from 5 may 1809: quando non piove, passeggio solo, e pensoso, e ne’ deserti campi anch’io come il signor canonico francesco; ma non però come lui or rime e versi, or colgo erbette e fiori; ch’io non amo le rime, e pavento d’accostarmi a’ versi; né in queste paludi trovo mai fiori, e invece di erbette, m’abbatto in erbacce crasse, e inodore. (epistolario iii 169; see text 11) between the eighteenth and nineteenth century there was a juxtaposition of two different ways of interpreting petrarch’s sonnets: at first emphasis was placed on the exterior “i più deserti campi,” the impassioned and consoling dialogue with the vastness of nature (“monti et piagge / et fiumi et selve”); subsequently prominence was placed on the humanist studies & the digital age giorgio forni 1.1 winter 2011 188 restless and solitary inner life, the i imprisoned amongst “marshes” and “weeds” of a grey and oppressive world. in conclusion, this methodology of inquiry based on comparative study of the reception allows, on the one hand, for a redefinition of the relationship between micro and macro text in the system of the canzoniere and on the other hand, for a thorough and refined reflection on the great rhythms of cultural history. texts text 1: f. petrarca, canzoniere 35. solo et pensoso i più deserti campi vo mesurando a passi tardi et lenti, et gli occhi porto per fuggire intenti ove vestigio human la rena stampi. altro schermo non trovo che mi scampi dal manifesto accorger de le genti, perché negli atti d’alegrezza spenti di fuor si legge com’io dentro avampi: sí ch’io mi credo omai che monti et piagge et fiumi et selve sappian di che tempre sia la mia vita, ch’è celata altrui. ma pur sí aspre vie né sí selvagge cercar non so ch’amor non venga sempre ragionando con meco, et io co llui. text 2: l. tansillo, i due pellegrini, lines 1-12. filauto: già si raddoppia il dì ch’io vo smarrito, mercé del piè che mi conduce in via dove vestigio uman trovo scolpito. sapessi almen dove mi vada o sia! ecco un che va solingo e fuor di strada: forse, di me pietoso, il ciel l’invia. pria che l’ombrosa notte qui m’invada, vo’ dimandar s’albergo è di vicino, dove le stanche membra a gittar vada. chiunque sei, del loco o peregrino, tu che il piè movi sì pensoso e vago, quel che cerchi t’apporti il tuo destino. text 3: p. bembo, rime 48. solingo augello, se piangendo vai la tua perduta dolce compagnia, humanist studies & the digital age giorgio forni 1.1 winter 2011 189 meco ne ven, che piango anco la mia: inseme potrem fare i nostri lai. ma tu la tua forse oggi troverai; io la mia quando? e tu pur tuttavia ti stai nel verde; i’ fuggo indi, ove sia chi mi conforte ad altro, ch’a trar guai. privo in tutto son io d’ogni mio bene, e nudo e grave e solo e peregrino vo misurando i campi e le mie pene. gli occhi bagnati porto e ’l viso chino e ’l cor in doglia e l’alma fuor di spene, né d’aver cerco men fero destino. text 4: b. tasso, lettera a claudio rangoni. fuggo, signor, ove l’arena stampi vestigio uman, ma non però poss’io fuggir l’ingordo e folle mio desio, né dell’arbor mio bel gli accesi lampi. i più secreti e solitarii campi cerco solingo, e suo mal grado invio il desir a virtù pigro e restio, né però trovo chi d’amor mi scampi. che ovunque volgo gli occhi infermi e chiusi veggio quei rami sacri e la dolc’ombra ch’al mio caldo pensier dà rezzo et òra. dunque s’io fallo e se talor m’ingombra vano disio vostra mercé mi scusi perché ’l nemico mio meco dimora. text 5: g.g. trìssino, rime 29. quanto ognior penso, più la mente ingombra nuovo pensiero, e giù nel cuor profondo mena sì grave e intolerabil pondo, che d’ogni suo piacer l’anima sgombra. crudel amor, crudel, che sotto l’ombra de l’ale tue sperai viver giocondo, ma pianta fui che in un terren fecondo uggia mortale in sul fiorire adombra. ond’io per selve e per deserti campi vò sospirando e consumando il giorno, senza riposo, infin che ’l sol s’asconde. poi, come vien la notte, a pianger torno, così mi guida amor, perch’io non scampi; humanist studies & the digital age giorgio forni 1.1 winter 2011 190 et io, lasso, pur vivo, e non so donde. text 6: b. tasso, libro primo degli amori 87. solo e pensoso i miei passati affanni, e li futuri ancor vo misurando, e veggio ben che sempre lagrimando spoglierò l’alma de’ terrestri panni; veggio che ’n tanti e sì gravosi affanni viver non posso; e sempre sospirando, mercé gridando, lagrimando, amando, fuggiran l’ore in un momento e gli anni; ma siami come vole acerba e fera l’alta mia donna, amore, e ’l mio destino, ch’a le mie notti non cheggio altro sole: sempre fian le bellezze al mondo sole ne l’alma impresse, e quella luce altera onde di gir al ciel scorgo il camino. text 7: v. alfieri, rime 135. solo, fra i mesti miei pensieri, in riva al mar là dove il tosco fiume ha foce, con fido il mio destrier pian pian men giva; e muggìan l’onde irate in suon feroce. quell’ermo lido, e il gran fragor mi empiva il cuor (cui fiamma inestinguibil cuoce) d’alta malinconia; ma grata, e priva di quel suo pianger, che pur tanto nuoce. dolce oblio di mie pene e di me stesso nella pacata fantasia piovea; e senza affanno sospirava io spesso: quella, ch’io sempre bramo, anco parea cavalcando venirne a me dappresso... nullo error mai felice al par mi fea. text 8: v. alfieri, rime 89. là dove muta solitaria dura piacque al gran bruno instituir la vita, a passo lento, per irta salita, mesto vo; la mestizia è in me natura. ma vi si aggiunge un’amorosa cura, che mi tien l’alma in pianto seppellita, sì che non trovo io mai spiaggia romita quanto il vorrebbe la mia mente oscura. pur questi orridi massi, e queste nere humanist studies & the digital age giorgio forni 1.1 winter 2011 191 selve, e i lor cupi abissi, e le sonanti acque or mi fan con più sapor dolere. non d’intender tai gioje ogni uom si vanti: le mie angosce sol creder potran vere gli ardenti vati, e gl’infelici amanti. text 9: u. foscolo, versi giovanili 12. quando la terra è d’ombre ricoverta, e soffia ’1 vento, e in sulle arene estreme l’onda va e vien che mormorando geme, e appar la luna tra le nubi incerta; torno dove la spiaggia è più deserta solingo a ragionar con la mia speme, e del mio cor che sanguinando geme ad or ad or palpo la piaga aperta. lasso! me stesso in me più non discerno, e languono i miei dì come viola nascente ch’abbia tempestata il verno; che va lungi da me colei che sola far potea sul mio labbro il riso eterno: luce degli occhi miei, chi mi t’invola? text 10: u. foscolo, ultime lettere di jacopo ortis, i, 364. – oh! diss’ella, con quel dolce entusiasmo tutto suo, credi tu che il petrarca non abbia anch’egli visitato sovente queste solitudini sospirando fra le ombre pacifiche della notte la sua perduta amica? quando leggo i suoi versi io me lo dipingo qui– malinconico–errante–appoggiato al tronco di un albero, pascersi de’ suoi mesti pensieri, e volgersi al cielo cercando con gli occhi lagrimosi la beltà immortale di laura. text 11: u. foscolo, lettere, a pietro borsieri, 5 maggio 1809. quando non piove, passeggio solo, e pensoso, e ne’ deserti campi anch’io come il signor canonico francesco; ma non però come lui or rime e versi, or colgo erbette e fiori; ch’io non amo le rime, e pavento d’accostarmi a’ versi; né in queste paludi trovo mai fiori, e invece di erbette, m’abbatto in erbacce crasse, e inodore. text 12: j.-j. rousseau, nouvelle héloïse i, 26. dans les violens transports qui m’agitent, je ne saurois demeurer en place; je cours, je monte avec ardeur, je m’élance sur les rochers; je parcours à grands pas tous les environs, et trouve par tout dans les objets la même horreur qui regne au dedans de moi. on n’apperçoit plus de verdure, l’herbe est jaune et flétrie, les arbres sont dépouillés, le séchard et la froide bise entassent la neige et les glaces, et toute la nature est morte à mes yeux, comme l’espérance au fond de mon cœur. humanist studies & the digital age giorgio forni 1.1 winter 2011 192 works cited aragona, tullia d’. le rime. ed. enrico celani. bologna: romagnoli, 1891. print. alfieri, vittorio. rime. ed. francesco maggini. asti: casa d’alfieri, 1954. print. ---. “vita di vittorio alfieri da asti scritta da esso.” opere. ed. vittore branca. milano: mursia, 1965. 3-281. print. ariosto, ludovico. orlando furioso. ed. cesare segre. milano: arnoldo mondadori, 1982. print. baldi, bernardino. versi e prose scelte. ed. filippo ugolini and filippo-luigi polidori. firenze: le monnier, 1859. print. bembo, pietro. prose e rime. 2nd ed. ed. carlo dionisotti. torino: utet, 1966. print. cavalcanti, guido. rime. contini, gianfranco, ed. poeti del duecento. milano-napoli: ricciardi, 1960. 487-567. print. foscolo, ugo. epistolario. ed. plinio carli. firenze: le monnier, 1949-1954. print. ---. poesie. ed. guido bezzola. milano: biblioteca universale rizzoli, 1974. print. ---. ultime lettere di jacopo ortis. ed. giovanni gambarin. firenze: le monnier, 1955. print. fregoso, antonio fileremo. “de la probità, al probo enrico boscano” in silve. web. 26 nov. 2010. <http://www.bibliotecaitaliana.it/>. giraldi cinzio, giovan battista. “orbecche.” teatro del cinquecento. tomo i. la tragedia. ed.renzo cremante. milano-napoli: ricciardi, 1988. 283-448. print. muzio, girolamo. “il pastor aristeo pensoso e solo” ed. lodovico domenichi. venezia: gabriel giolito di ferrarii, 1545. 273-75. print. petrarca, francesco. canzoniere. ed. marco santagata. milano: arnoldo mondadori, 2004. print. petrarch project. university of oregon yamada language center, 2010. web. 26 nov. 2010. <http://language.uoregon.edu/petrarch/>. quondam, amedeo. filosofia della luce e luminosi nelle egloghe del gravina: documenti per un capitolo della cultura filosofica di fine seicento. napoli: guida, 1970. print. rota, berardino. egloghe pescatorie. ed. stefano bianchi. roma: carrocci, 2005. print. rousseau, jean-jacques. nouvelle héloïse in œuvres complètes. ed. bernard gagnebin and marcel raymond. paris: gallimard, 1959-1995. ii, 7-808. print. tansillo, luigi. l’egloga e i poemetti secondo la genuina lezione dei codici e delle prime stampe. ed. francesco flamini. napoli: vecchi, 1893. print. tasso, bernardo. lettere inedite. ed. giuseppe campori. bologna: romagnoli, 1869. print. ---. rime. ed. domenico chiodo and vercingetorige martignone. torino: res, 1995. print. http://www.bibliotecaitaliana.it/ http://language.uoregon.edu/petrarch/ humanist studies & the digital age giorgio forni 1.1 winter 2011 193 tasso, torquato. gerusalemme liberata. ed. lanfranco caretti. milano: arnoldo mondadori, 1995. print. ---. rinaldo. ed. luigi bonfigli. bari: laterza, 1936. print. torti, giovanni. poesie complete. ed. giovanni battista cereseto and luigi cicchero. genova: grondonà, 1853. print. trìssino, gian giorgio. rime 1529. ed. amedeo quondam and gabriella milan. vicenza: neri pozza, 1981. print. for a study of the reception of the canzoniere in the “petrarch project” giorgio forni, university of messina solitude / flight the conflict of the petrarchist styles on the boundary of the ages texts works cited humanist studies & the digital age, 5.1 (2017) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.7264/n379433b visualizing the fragmenta’s poetic systems isabella magni abstract digital tools offer new dimensions and additional contexts both in teaching and in researching petrarch’s rerum vulgarium fragmenta, providing users with visual insights into his carefully planned work. the features of the petrarchive (www.petrarchive.org) emphasize intentionally the physical and visual properties of petrarch's poetry while offering the user a comprehensive view of the structure and content of the collection of 366 poems. this essay investigates these interactive visual representations of the material and spatial systems of the fragmenta as a means to better understanding historical shifts in genre and form as well as petrarch's anxieties about the sequencing of the poems in the fragmenta. in so doing, the author elucidates the deep interaction between the digital code created to build the petrarchive’s visual indexes and remediate the original medieval forms of the chartae on which the poems are written. the examples demonstrate that the interplay between the digital tool and petrarch's poetic system offers rich meaning about thematic and figurative understandings of the fragmenta. when talking about petrarch’s rerum vulgarium fragmenta, the connection between textual-material features of the handwritten manuscripts and its digital encoding exceeds the mere reproduction of the texts, allowing us to investigate the central role of the “indexicality” of its textual systems. although they might seem like complete opposites, the physical materiality of the manuscript and the strip of digital code have a remarkably fertile interconnection. it is not surprising to talk about “code” both in terms of material literary production (codex) and in terms of the series of alphanumeric instructions used to represent a text on the web (code) (magni 2016). material philology and digital code share the basic issue of representation of texts, both on a theoretical and on a pragmatic basis: digital tools allow us not only to translate and display textual components, including scribal errors, erasures, marginalia and palimpsests, but also material and visual components, such as mise en page and mise en text, blank spaces and visual dynamics of the charte, both at a microand a macro-text level in order to represent features that have traditionally been overlooked by editors and to conduct searches for information and textual conditions that could otherwise not be retrieved. at times, the process of creating a digital code drives editors to re-think the dynamics of the texts themselves, as marta werner (2008) confesses about her work of digitally editing emily dickinson’s letters: “i have tried to restore as far as possible their material integrity and to give readers unmediated (or, rather, less mediated) access to dickinson’s manuscripts as she left them. in so doing, radical scatters encourages new investigations into both the dynamics of dickinson’s compositional process and the play of autonomy and intertextuality in her late work.” (30, emphasis added). this essay investigates the problem of space, genre and architecture of the http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ humanist studies & the digital age magni 5.1 (2017) 72 page in petrarch’s songbook proposing new and “less mediated” digital solutions adopted in building visual indexes for the petrarchive (storey, walsh and magni), a new rich-text digital edition combining different levels of visualization of the text: facsimile high-quality images of vat.lat.3195, its diplomatic transcriptions and edited forms. the rerum vulgarium fragmenta is an icon in the western literary tradition, yet it still presents problematic issues debated among scholars about its ‘final’ textual and material forms. although we possess a partial holograph (vaticano latino 3195) in part transcribed by a copyist1 and in part by the poet himself, we need to keep in mind that the fragmenta was not finished at the time of petrarch’s death. being the latest authorial witness of the songbook, vaticano latino 3195 is often erroneously considered the “original” and “final” form.2 its unbound gatherings, though, were probably still open to further modifications and experimentations. it is critical, therefore, to reflect on petrarch’s fragmenta in terms of what it is and what it can still tell us after centuries of studies not only in terms of textual content (interpretation), but also in terms of the culture that produced it and the careful attention of the poet in the construction of the songbook as a book, and not just as a juxtaposition of 366 poems. as storey noted: la tenace rivendicazione di petrarca dell’integrità testuale e i suoi metodi editoriali innovativi ne fanno uno dei protagonisti militanti della riforma culturale e letteraria del tempo, paladino tanto della tutela della produzione ‘fisica’ dei manoscritti, quanto del miglioramento della comprensibilità della scrittura e del testo. […] la sua inesausta ricerca della ‘pagina perfetta’ derivava da un approccio all’oggetto-libro, materiale ed artistico insieme, fondato sull’armonia della carta e sull’armonia dell’intrecciarsi delle interrelazioni tra genere e forma, testo e mise en page” (131-2, emphasis added). the study of the materiality of texts is not a mere philological practice but it entails deep cultural and historical considerations: material products are always a compromise between two (or even three) cultures, the one in which the work is created and the one that produces (and then re-produces) it for its transmission. manuscripts and printed books are not simple containers, but cultural artifacts that are prepared and are themselves products of a historical interpretation. in the case of petrarch’s fragmenta, material and philological features are so authorially driven that we cannot disregard them while reading and interpreting its texts (barolini 2007). it is certainly not a surprise to know how much the poet himself was involved in personally directing and then transcribing the songbook in its textual contents and in the material organization of the work as a whole. main characteristics of his carefully structured poetics are 1) 31-line-per-charta canvas, strictly linked to the thematic integrity of each page; 2) multiple forms of indexicality and subsequent 1 in a recent publication monica berté doubts about the identity of the copyist of vat.lat.3195, proposing to separate the historical figure of young malpaghini from that of petrarch’s scribe: this recent theory suggests the urge to question with a more historical approach the figure of the fragmenta’s copyist, an approach that can be addressed with the visual resources digital tools can offer. 2 for a reflection on the implications of using the word “original” see storey 2011. humanist studies & the digital age magni 5.1 (2017) 73 simplicity of reading at each level of textual engagement; 3) transcriptional and organizational principles for the 31-canvas lines (first of all the four-sonnets-per-charta principle with sonnets transcribed over 7 transcriptional lines, two verses per line read horizontally, and second the sonnetsestina charta with its contrasting two-column reading strategies, horizontal for sonnet and vertical for sestina); and 4) pivotal functionality of space both at a micro-text and at a macro-text level. through a careful digital reconstruction, it is now possible to bring to the surface petrarch’s research of the “pagina perfetta” (“perfect page”) and keep petrarch’s texts and their original cultural contexts at the center. there are many moments in the process of encoding petrarch’s texts that pushed us to reflect upon and rethink the dynamics of the edition in the context of medieval manuscript production. the string of alphanumeric information used to build the digital code of petrarch’s fragmenta (xml-tei) translates to the machine not only the textual content but also philological, material and visual information creating an indissoluble link between object and related markup. here is a brief example of the beginning of charta 1recto: <pb n=”charta 1 verso” facs=”../images/vat-lat3195-f/vat-lat3195-f-001v.jpg” /> <lg xml :id=”rvf005” type=”sonnet” n=”5”> <lg type=”octave”> <lg type=”dblvrs” corresp=”#canvasline”> <l n=”1”><hi rendition=”#red #fs24pt”>q</hi><hi rendition=”#small-caps”>u</ hi>ando io<choice><orig>mouo</orig><reg>movo</reg></choice> i sospiri a chiamar <choice><orig>uoi</orig><reg>voi</reg></choice><supplied>,</supplied></l> <l n=”2”><choice><orig>el</orig><reg>e’l</reg></choice> nome che nel cor mi scrisse <choice><orig>amore</orig><reg>amore</reg></choice>&v2c ;</l> </lg>[…] in this basic strip of encoding, the tag <pb> indicates a page break including the facsimile image (facs=”../images/vat-lat3195-f/vat-lat3195-f-001v.jpg”) of charta 1verso (n=”charta 1 verso”) and is followed by the markup of the first line group (<lg>) transcribed on the same charta: sonnet rvf 5 (type=”sonnet” n=”5”). every single tag of the alphanumeric strip of encoding refers to and translates one specific textual, prosodic or visual component of the medieval manuscript: the charta is divided into multiple <lg> (line group) units: the first is a “sonnet” line group (rvf 5). this fourteen-verse line group is then subdivided into two subsequent <lg>: octave (lg type=“octave”), humanist studies & the digital age magni 5.1 (2017) 74 the first four verses organized over four canvas lines (lg type=“dblvrs” correps=“#canvasline”); and sestet (lg type=“sestet”), the remaining six verses transcribed over two canvas lines (lg type=“dblvrs” correps=“#canvasline”). the result of the transformation of the encoding onto the web page is a more authentic representation of petrarch’s editorial principles for which he worked restlessly for over a decade, supervising the copyist work first, and attempting to continue it later. the encoding, in fact, translates and renders the different levels of visualization and philologies of the text: photographic, diplomatic and edited, all visualized in their new digital form on the web page. looking back at the actual encoding of charta 1verso, at a closer look it clearly signals the copresence of these levels of representation: the high-definition image (<pb>), the diplomatic transcription (<orig> which stands for ‘original’) and the edited text (<reg> which stands for regularized). a simple strip of encoding like <choice><orig>mouo</orig><reg>movo</reg></choice> is telling the machine and therefore the user that in this moment of the text (rvf5 line1) the original text in diplomatic transcription present the verb “mouo” which has been normalized by the petrarchive editors in the edited (and more modern) form “movo”. the advantages of this borndigital approach are evident in both its simplicity and depth: transparency of encoding (ways of always tracing back the editorial decisions) and maintenance of medieval contexts, its material structures and a more modernized/accessible text. in the digital representation of the textual and visual components of the fragmenta’s poetics, the different kinds of indexes and accesses to the texts proposed by the petrarchive represent a clear example of how digital tools provide new ways of visualizing and investigating the dynamic relationships between genres and poems both at a microand at a macro-text level. the first and more ‘traditional’ way of accessing petrarch’s 366 poems is the textual index. a careful encoding and a digital platform allow the presence of hyperlinks directly connecting to the textual transcriptions of individual chartae and individual poems inside each of those chartae: <body> <tr> <td><a href="content/c001r.xml#rvf001">1</a></td> <td>1r</td> <td><a href="content/c001r.xml#rvf001">voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono</a></td> <td>sonnet</td> </tr> </body> humanist studies & the digital age magni 5.1 (2017) 75 in the html encoding above, digitally translating the first entry of the textual index (rvf1), the html element <tr> signals the beginning and end of one line in which four child-elements <td> will be included: poem number (<tb>1</tb>), charta number (<tb>1r</tb>), first verse (<tb>voi c’ascoltate…</tb>) and literary genre (<tb>sonnet</tb>). hyperlinks to the transcriptions of the specific poem (in this case the first sonnet, rvf1) are embedded both in the poem number and in the first line (html element <a>), so that users can easily navigate between the index and the textual transcriptions. figure 1. portion of text index from petrarchive: voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono (rfv1). the result on the screen is a traditional index allowing different points of navigation into the songbook. the encoding and flexibility of the digital medium also allow multiple reorientations of the index, sorting the 366 entries according to 1) poem number (corresponding to the material position of the poems in ms. vat.lat.3195), 2) first line (alphabetical order from a to z and vice versa), 3) genre. but the true innovation of digital approaches is the possibility of new visual access to petrarch’s work. the petrarchive visual index offers indeed three ways of representation of the macrostructures of the 366 poems: 1) the whole manuscript in one single box (fig.2); 2) all the chartae organized and visualized by charta, with the recto and verso side by side; 3) and organized by fascicles. in fig. 2 below, the visual index shows the entirety of ms. vat.lat.3195 with its different layers of composition, its two hands of transcription – the copyist’s in brown and petrarch’s in blue – its disposition of the different genres on the manuscript charta, and its distinctive use of space as a form of punctuation at multiple levels not only separating the potential never-completed collection in two parts, but also signaling crucial moments in the transcription: http://dcl.slis.indiana.edu/petrarchive/textindex.php humanist studies & the digital age magni 5.1 (2017) 76 figure 2. petrarchive’s visual index. through the multiple views of petrarchive’s visual indexes, the user can experience graphic visualizations of the different genres recognizable without the need for reading textual transcriptions. it is easy to recognize, for example, all of the four sonnet chartae or the pairings sonnet-sestina clearly distinguishable by their respective characteristic transcriptional principles and the subsequent “blank” space signaling, for example, the line separating the consistent 7-line-sonnets or empty lines in the right column of sestina. the disposition of the genres on the manuscript façade in petrarch’s fragmenta is, indeed, not accidental but it represents a carefully studied textual distribution on which the poet himself tirelessly worked for decades (storey 1993, brugnolo and storey 2004). we possess a material proof of it in manuscript vat.lat.3196. an experimental workplace, vat.lat.3196 also contains drafts of poems with multiple authorial annotations and marginalia, revealing a constant process of revision, erasure and editing. for example, on c.07r the poet writes in the margin referring to sonnets per mirar policleto (rvf77) and quando giunse a simon (rvf78): “transcripti isti duo in ordine […]”. the spatial references, defined by the expression in ordine, refer to the groupings of poems that petrarch will later transcribe “in order” in the partial holograph 3195. in both physical places (3196 and 3195), poems included in a single charta are virtually linked by their physical position and by thematic or stylistic recurrences and progressions. the two sonnets dedicated to painter martini, not only are copied “in ordine” but they also form a close grouping both for position and content. the materiality of texts and in particular the treatment of literary genres leads us to rethink about the graphic dynamics within documents and their intrinsic visual-cultural contexts. http://dcl.slis.indiana.edu/petrarchive/images/petrarchive__visual_index_to_vat__lat__3195.jpg humanist studies & the digital age magni 5.1 (2017) 77 the perception of literary genres changes throughout different historical times, also modifying the perception of their visual structures. if we think about the treatment of sonnets in the middle ages, including the fragmenta’s early manuscript tradition, we can immediately perceive the complex cultural connotations, especially if we compare them with the renaissance treatment of the same genre. a dramatic symbol of the cultural transformation in the perception of literary genres in the transmission of petrarch’s fragmenta is ms.riccardiano 1108. until c.26v, the manuscript reflects the conventional two-verses-horizontal reading for all genres, except the sestina. in the middle of c. 27r, in between the transcriptions of canzone perché la vita è breve (rvf71) and canzone gentil mia donna io veggio (rvf72), the copyist directly intervenes to signal his decision to switch to a more modern vertical reading transcription, as he signals in an annotation: “non mi piace di piu seguire di scrivere nel modo che ò tenuto da quince a dietro, cioè di passare da l’uno colonnello all’altro; anzi intendo di seguire giu per lo cholonnello tanto che si compia la chançone o sonetto che sia.” the copyist declares himself tired of following the medieval traditional two-column-horizontal transcription – which he clearly feels far from his own cultural contexts and emphatically announces the sudden change of direction with the shift to a vertical orientation of texts. the often-quoted episode emphatically establishes the cultural shift in the reading and transmission of the fragmenta: a tendency which will be established in renaissance copies and will prevail in the tradition of petrarchan studies until nowadays. in petrarch’s carefully and authorially planned textual and visual structures, the depth and role of genre and spatial distribution of the façade of each page can quickly be appreciated and further analyzed under a new digital light. the graphic “image” files are in fact xml text files in the scalable vector graphics format (svg), which contain the information necessary for the web browser to reproduce the image.3 the digital svg images created to represent the façade of the manuscript chartae in the digital reconstruction are simple and direct representations of petrarch’s material structures, with arrows signaling the directionality of the text distribution. on charta 3verso, for example, the user can easily distinguish the shift in directionality between the sonnet (horizontal) and the sestina (vertical): 3 scalable vector graphics (svg) is an xml-based vector image format used to create twodimensional graphics with potential support for interactivity and animation. the svg specification is an open standard developed by the world wide web consortium. https://www.w3.org/graphics/svg/about.html humanist studies & the digital age magni 5.1 (2017) 78 figure 3. sgv image of c.3v (sonnet rvf 21 mille fiate, o dolce mia guerriera and sestina rvf 22 a qualunque animale alberga in terra). the visual index above (fig.3) digitally reproduces fundamental features of the poetic systems of the page: alternating red and blue initials on the right of the text indentation signaling to the medieval reader (and now to the contemporary user) the beginning of new poems and functioning as a textual index; blank space serves as an additional punctuation device both in separating the two poems and in signaling the vertical reading strategy of the sestina with its partially blank right column (visible in light blue color in the graphic svg images); and paragraph markers in the sestina offer additional visual indexicality indicating the vertical disposition of the text. the description of petrarch’s visual poetics embedded in the text encoding is therefore also represented in the petrarchive visual indexes. even from a brief look at the visual index of the entire songbook (see fig.2 above), the nine pairings of sonnet-sestina present in the collection are immediately recognizable: once again, even before reading the textual content of the poems, the medieval reader – and now the digital user – can collect a series of cultural information related to the genres and their material and visual treatments. petrarch’s systematic use of space to create both division and unity in his collection has often been translated – especially in print editions, from the renaissance on – into a new modernized reorganization of the texts and their collocation on the page. given their potentials in terms of visualization and simultaneity, digital representations allow users to skip the print filter and to create a bridge between the culture that produced the work and the digital interface. the construction of the digital codex also forces editors to rethink and conceptualize the role of blank space in petrarch’s poetics. the poet’s pivotal and often overlooked use of space is not a mere aesthetic issue, but at times it provides the very role and meaning of poems themselves. the most obvious and evident example is the unruled charta 52v, a “stop space” signaling a break between sonnet arbor victoriosa triumphale (rvf 263) and canzone i' vo pensando (rvf264). humanist studies & the digital age magni 5.1 (2017) 79 figures 4 and 5. sgv images of c.52v and 53r (canzone i'vo pensando -rvf264). while the ‘space’ for the initial “i” has been added outside the ‘text block’ in the left margin of the charta, the blank space in the previous façade (c.52v) signals a stop and a new beginning in the collection. while the previous chartae (cc. 49v-52r) are blank and ruled, therefore functioning as potential space maybe (but we are here in pure conjectural interpretation) for future additional (but actually never added) poems, c.52v remains unruled and therefore assumes a very different role: that of marking a “full stop” in the collection, a pause before the beginning of a new section. a further example of divisional stop space is represented by the eight blank transcriptional lines at the bottom of c.22r, in which malpaghini leaves blank space between the sonnet l'aspectata vertù (rvf104) and canzone mai non vo' più cantar com'io soleva (rvf105) to indicate a pause in the macro-text: humanist studies & the digital age magni 5.1 (2017) 80 figures 6 and 7. sgv images c.22r-v: stop-space announcing the beginning of rvf105. the stop space at the bottom of c.22r could have easily held the first 12 or even 14 verses of rvf105. there are other instances in ms. vat. lat. 3195, in fact, of a canzone’s transcription beginning at the end of a charta, just as c. 24v's final lines which carry the first 12 verses of canzone una donna più bella assai che 'l sole (rvf 119), following three sonnets: pien di quella ineffabil dolcezza (rvf116), se ‘l sasso (rvf117) and rimasi a dietro il sestodecimo anno (rvf118). the choice of leaving eight transcriptional lines blank, though, clearly signals a pause in the narrative and in the layout of the charta, a “full stop” transforming the following canzone into a poetic manifesto: the incipit and the content of mai non vo’ più cantar com’io soleva (never again do i want to sing [poetry] as i used to) can only confirm that this is a crucial editorial shift in the poetics of the fragmenta. blank space can also function as placeholder for postponed decisions. charta 37r, for example, in which malpaghini leaves a blank space and later petrarch transcribes sonnet geri, quando talor meco s’adira (rvf179). it is not, therefore, space created by an erasure but a placeholder, which leaves the macrotext open for potential future additions while at the same time establishing material spatial limitations on the poem to be potentially added (a limitation determined by the number of transcriptional lines available). the very nature of the visual index provides a new digital “space” in which to investigate even further the spatial dynamics established by petrarch in decades of interrupted work in composing, transcribing, editing erasing and calculating “ideal” forms and spaces of his songbook. visual indexes and digital representations also provide a new insight into the three temporal and spatial phases of preparation of petrarch’s unfinished partial holograph. the first project is revealed by the rubricated chartae transcribed by the copyist, set aside in 1367 when he abruptly left his service (see the visual index of fig. 2 in brown: five quaternions [cc.1r-40v] in part i and two humanist studies & the digital age magni 5.1 (2017) 81 fascicles, one quaternion and one binion, in part ii [cc.53r-60v, cc.61r-62v and 71r-72v]). next, we see petrarch’s continuation of the compilation process in an attempt of maintaining a fair copy (visual index in blue with colored initials: another quaternion [cc.41r-48v] in part i and four more chartae [cc.59r-62v]) in part ii. finally, the latest additions reveal what is by then a service and work copy (visual index in blue without colored initials: four chartae at the end of part i [cc.49r-52v] and the last binion added [cc.69r-70v] with the transcription of canzone quel’ antiquo mio dolce empio signore [rvf356{revised360}]). the user can now clearly visualize these phases of petrarch’s assembling of the “book” and therefore further investigate an area of petrarchan studies still very problematic: that of the genesis of the work. the late insertion of two binions within the last fascicle (cc.63r-66v and cc.67r-70v), for example, offers an occasion to rethink also the genesis of the text in terms of space and not only in terms of time. these insertions in the middle of the final quaternion entail the incorporation of additional poems before the concluding canzone vergine bella (rvf366), in a place where petrarch was potentially still working around the time of his death, given the small numbers in the margin reordering the last 31 poems. at the core of new digital methods is therefore a new orientation into petrarch’s material and visual poetics that he personally and consistently used to construct the layout of the entire work. ironically, the digital code, through its interactive and simultaneous visualizations, seems to be the most suitable to display the essential dynamics of the charta and the material codex. the virtual representation on the web page of the different aspects of the fragmenta its textual and graphic, temporal and spatial components allows scholars to rebuild the structural and visual principles implemented by petrarch himself at the level of single charta, fascicles and macro-structures and therefore to repropose the poet’s editorial choices, skipping the filter of print editions whose cultural mediations and interpretative variations have modified the way the text is visualized and therefore received and interpreted. works cited: storey, h. wayne, john a.walsh and isabella magni. petrarchive: an edition of petrarch’s songbook, rerum vulgarium fragmenta. 2013-current. http://dcl.slis.indiana.edu/petrarchive/ barolini, teodolinda, “introduction.” petrarch and the textual origins of interpretation. brill, 2007. berté, monica. “malpaghini copista di petrarca?” cn lxxv, 2015, pp.205-16. brugnolo, furio. “libro d’autore e forma-canzoniere: implicazioni grafico-visive nell’originale dei rerum vulgarium fragmenta.” commentario all’edizione in fac-simile. edited by belloni, brugnolo, storey e zamponi, 2004, pp.105–29. magni, isabella. “i codici paralleli dei fragmenta.” medioevo letterario d’italia 12, 2015. storey, h. wayne transcription and visual poetics in the early italian lyric. garland, 1993. ———. “all’interno della poetica grafico-visiva del petrarca.” commentario all’edizione in fac-simile. edited by belloni, brugnolo, storey, and zamponi 2004, pp.131–171. http://www.petrarchive.org/ http://dcl.slis.indiana.edu/petrarchive/ humanist studies & the digital age magni 5.1 (2017) 82 ———. “petrarch’s ‘original’ of the fragmenta 1362-1558: from boccaccio to rovillo’s third printing.” humanist studies & the digital age 1.1, 2011, pp.28-49. werner, marta l. “signals from a distance: editing, telepathy, elegy”. textual cultures 3.1, 2008, pp.3– 11. ghosts of solitude: guido gozzano, reader of petrarch an episode of the twentieth-century reception of rvf 35 humanist studies & the digital age, 1.1 (2011) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.1.1.1221 209 ghosts of solitude: guido gozzano, reader of petrarch. an episode of the twentieth-century reception of rvf 35 alessandra mantovani, university of bologna1 abstract: the essay offers a comparative analysis of guido gozzano’s poem “un’altra risorta,” from the collection i colloqui (1911), and the petrarchan sonnet “solo e pensoso” (rvf 35), of which gozzano gives a modern and partially ironic rewriting. sonnet 35, together with a constellation of elements drawn from other poems from the canzoniere concerning the theme of love surviving the loss of beauty and the passing of time, gives to the modern poet the thematic and lexical frame to describe his condition of sceptical, disillusioned lover. gozzano’s poetry represents in this sense a significant episode of twentieth-century petrarchism and the critical and problematic relationship of contemporary poetry with the language of literary tradition. to do justice to the transformations that affect the various forms of literary language during the avant-garde period in the early twentieth century, to this day it is difficult to find a general formula more effective and appealing than that identified by harold rosenberg, “tradition of the new” (“tradizione del nuovo”) (223-24). the dynamic contrast implied by a definition that describes the deconstruction and resemanticization of languages in the context of a comprehensive de-definition of art is well able to suggest the dual movement that we find in the evolution of twentieth-century poetry, from taxonomic maps of operative principles to “repertoires of re-usable tools” (asor rosa 213), tools we can reuse precisely because of their patent distance from and dissimilarity to their original context. inside observers early on focused their attention on this process of dismantling and reassembling these poetic codes, in which the normativity of a tradition identifiable as unified fails to appear. this is the case of renato serra, a man of letters of piercing critical acuity who lived in the early 1900s in italy, a context that was only partly provincial and belated. serra writes in the form of a chronicle, to all appearances disengaged, that seems to record the voices, faces, and works of “writing” italy without aiming at either univocal syntheses or judgments. he traces a memorable portrait of a generation that looks back with a kind of “admiration affirmed and curiosity satisfied,” thus bearing on its shoulders, in an atmosphere of inventory if not quite of liquidation, a “light” or non-coercive legacy (serra 379). the “lack of features typical of a ‘school,’ of imitations, of similarities,” which complicates the formulation of judgments and the very possibility of sketching “an overall portrait,” is born of a free, almost anarchical, “light” relationship to the normative poetics of tradition, with regard to which the critic, despite the abundance of “verse,” has difficulty identifying authentic experiences of “poetry.” within a literary scene dominated by an http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ humanist studies & the digital age alessandra mantovani 1.1 winter 2011 210 overabundance of ephemeral and dissipated literature transformed into a commodity that is read “and, what’s more, bought” (366)—and thus does not assuage the distrust of a critic in search of a difficult modern “classicism”—it is thus no accident that serra sensed a unique authenticity of tone, a voice of true poetry, in the work of guido gozzano (1883-1916). serra sees gozzano as a real poet (setting aside a pretense which strikes him as little more than a pose, a limp and languid display of “ostentatious simplicity” and “refusal of literariness”), a poet in whom he perceives a “capable and subtle virtuoso of verbal effects,” a real “artist,” one of those “for whom words exist before everything else.” what serra perceives in gozzano is the refined and profoundly literary nature of the poetic word, a word which achieves, refracted in different tones, the subversive imitation of the italian lyric tradition—no mere prosaic reduction, but an ironic doubling in which high and low, trivial and sublime gain meaning from the unexpected juxtaposition with the voices of the auctores. modest simplicity is thus a mask placed over the face, a “pretense” to which gozzano lent himself “with ready ambiguity, finding himself in his readers’ illusion as in a mirror” (406-409). serra’s is an accurate insight, corroborated by the words that gozzano addressed to his friend salvator gotta in 1916, on the eve of his death. these words shed light on the relationship of the poet to the italian lyric tradition and its tutelary gods. “and among so much affirmation and undeserved praise (later discounted) i am proud of this: that hardly anybody recognized me; i am proud of having refined my subalpine boeotian illiteracy thanks to the canzoniere and the divina commedia” (quoted in italian in masoero 81).2 the horizon of gozzano’s models appears then a plural space, in which the genetic connection with the poetry of d’annunzio and pascoli can be more thoroughly integrated and historicized in the light of a systematic return to the classic roots of italian poetic language. thus—gozzano writes—“a poetry infected for years by pascoli’s and d’annunzio’s chlorosis” could be “restored by the desperate study of dante and petrarch, annotating, pondering, weighing the words needed for his [sic] palette” (masoero 81). being modern by looking backward—the true aspiration of all classicism (santagata 3334)—underlies a poetic project that assumes the commedia and perhaps even more the rerum vulgarium fragmenta, the topic of this discussion, as a “book of poetic apprenticeship” (guglielminetti 49), capable of restoring, and maybe even partly healing, a poet sick with the shame of poetry. not surprisingly, carlo calcaterra had anticipated that gozzano’s work could be read as a chapter sui generis in the history of twentieth-century petrarchism. already in 1948 calcaterra published an essay in studi petrarcheschi that illustrated, through a painstaking comparison of the texts, some petrarchan modes recognizable in the form of an almost verbatim citation in all of gozzano’s works, but especially in i colloqui (calcaterra 213). calcaterra’s was the exact analytical insight of a refined philologist and informed reader, which has been broadly substantiated by research in the past 20 years. the late marziano guglielminetti deserves credit for this, as does the turin school which, with mariarosa masoero, has supervised the organization, cataloguing, and editing of all of gozzano’s humanist studies & the digital age alessandra mantovani 1.1 winter 2011 211 autographic work, mostly unpublished, which is now preserved at the centro studi per la letteratura italiana in piemonte guido gozzano-cesare pavese. the existence among the papers of the fondo gozzano, next to a quaderno dantesco, of a quaderno petrarchesco in which gozzano transcribes petrarch’s verses, (now verbatim and now modified, in a sort of personal anthology, a repertoire of citations) takes on the status of documentary evidence substantiated by the comparison with his copy of the canzoniere. in it the young poet reads and carefully underlines hundreds of verses, transcribing them into his own notebook and sometimes using them as an exercise in true creative aemulatio. the elements we now have at our disposal make up priceless documentation that we may scrutinize, as we have perhaps not yet fully done, to fully understand the logic inherent in gozzano’s use of petrarch’s language, which leads to a petrarchism that is, as i noted earlier, sui generis. this petrarchism is not assimilable to the general twentieth-century reappropriation of petrarch, which consists of “a restoration of poetic language as an absolute means of personal knowledge and dialogue with the inner self” (guglielminetti 49), though guglielminetti seems to associate gozzano with it. instead, gozzano’s crepuscularism falls entirely into the defining literary event of the twentieth century, namely the crisis and revision of lyric language born of an experience of reduction and decentralization of the self, which, in the failed correspondence of psychological time to historical time, splits the self before “a bare and ephemeral present” (lorenzini 13). for this reason crepuscular poetry well adopts the unresolved point of view of “perplexity,” which on the one hand yields a gaze that lingers on “the phenomenal,” the “detail,” the “marginal,” and on the other displays a self that is a mere mask, whose “irrelevance” can nevertheless see things as they are, returned at last to themselves, having tarnished their “enamel” and blighted their “decorative emphasis” (lorenzini13). and thus it is likely that in gozzano’s case the retrieval of the literary word of petrarch’s lyric tradition is functional to an authenticity of diction perceived as a prerogative of the lyric language of early italian poetry, along the lines of saba’s quest for an “honest poetry” (saba 759) and later montale’s guise of a regained “everyday decency” (montale 264). as calcaterra emphasized, it was by means of this dual retrieval that gozzano’s petrarchism, both “ideal” and “formal,” hid, behind the virtuosity of a man of letters, the zest and interest for “a poetic language that seemed to him perfect and at the same time so simple and honed that it seemed almost spoken” (calcaterra 222-23). the autographic annotation “turin, 9 june 1905,” in the margin of sonnet 61 in gozzano’s own copy of the canzoniere, is an indication that his reading of petrarch, which represents an important chapter in the history of the twentieth-century reception of the canzoniere, is no sporadic occurrence but a habit of long standing. we can deduce that the quest for new tones, which entails an effective removal of the most opaque residues of gozzano’s poetic apprenticeship as a reader of d’annunzio (guglielminetti and masoero 169-70), not only begins well before the publication of la via del rifugio (1907), but also humanist studies & the digital age alessandra mantovani 1.1 winter 2011 212 must be tied to the discovery of the possibilities rooted in the language of the italian literary tradition through the re-reading of its classics. from this point of view it is significant that gozzano read petrarch’s rime in the memorable edition of 1899 by giosuè carducci and severino ferrari (masoero 11), because carducci’s commentary is in itself an extraordinary event in the history of petrarch reception and a formidable redefinition of the “petrarch function” in the history of italian poetry. carducci’s commentary presented itself as the historical memory of the commentary tradition, and in the stylistic analysis of the text echoes the later poets who have recognized themselves in the petrarchan identity of the lyric code. this commentary can become a precious tool in the hands of a young writer who, inevitably, reads poems in search of his own individual voice. to encounter petrarch through carducci means to understand, in the attention given to stylistic, rhetoric, and metric aspects, that a writer can tell the story of his or her own poetry through poetry itself and that the idea of a truly modern lyric ends up coinciding with the “museum of literature and its forms” (finotti 271). and this without a doubt takes us back to gozzano and to his way of being a poet. furthermore we must also bear in mind that, if that very commentary identified leopardi as one of the strongest readers and most extraordinary interpreters of the rerum vulgarium fragmenta, gozzano too looks to leopardi as one of “his” poets (masoero 29) and finds in leopardi’s verse the secret of a poetic word which is able to recapture, beyond every aestheticizing fiction, a true connection with things. the marvelously “familiar” character that leopardi as a reader of petrarch identified in the “archaic” language of early italian, in which the absolute simplicity of universal experience meets the “pellegrino” of poetry without any apparent contradiction (trenti 15253), perhaps provides us with a key that lets us more fully understand gozzano’s petrarchism. in fact gozzano uses literature as an ironic and tragic tool to demystify literature itself, like a kaleidoscope that refracts and calls into question its values and meanings, along with its codes and forms. and it is probably for this reason that his most challenging collection of poems opens with a direct reference to petrarch. choosing “giovenile errore,” a hemistich of the opening sonnet of the canzoniere, as the title of the first section of i colloqui (1911), states in limine the poematic intention of a macrotext which, as a modern canzoniere, means to tell, through its component poems, the story of a life. in fact the book of poems identifies itself straightaway as a “libro di passato” and, as such, as the story of a “giovinezza,” beautiful and betrayed as “un romanzo che non fu vissuto.” gozzano’s “giovenile errore,” unlike petrarch’s, must be identified with the literary illness which estranges a man from himself, deprives him of experience, and condemns him to a life unlived. thus the self whose story is supposed to be told instead splits into the alienated image of the “mute brother” (“fratello muto”) and the memorial act itself fails because memory, far from constituting after the fact the sense of a journey to which petrarch’s citation obviously refers—“a ciascun passo mi rivolsi indietro, / curioso di lui, humanist studies & the digital age alessandra mantovani 1.1 winter 2011 213 con occhi fissi / spiando il suo pensiero, or gaio or tetro”—no longer belongs to him. the subject can only chronicle the youth lived by the other, “la bella favola compita,” which does not coincide with the “favola breve” of an existence that makes sense only by virtue of its own frailty, but identifies itself with a fate of mere survival overshadowed by solitude and aridity: “non vivo. solo, gelido, in disparte / sorrido e guardo vivere me stesso” (“i do not live. alone, icy, apart, i smile and watch myself live.”3). on the model of an existential trajectory whose meaning lies in the encounter with love and with death and which entrusts to a book destined to perpetuate the memory the task of deciphering that meaning which is fulfilled only in a transcendent dimension, the modern poet retraces his own personal experience, handing to the reader the image of himself flattened within a present without depth, like that of a “survivor,” “reduce dall’amore e dalla morte / gli hanno mentito le due cose belle.” he has survived a love that he never fully experienced and a death which led him “to the edge” (“alle soglie”) and then rejected him. likewise the slender “manoscritto” to which the poet’s personal history is consigned— “pochi giochi di sillaba e di rima”—does not guarantee that he will be remembered, and the very poetry, whose duration is denied—“mah! come un libro di rima, dilegua, passa, non dura!”—disproves, with petrarch’s own words, the humanistic and petrarchan dream of the triumph of literature over time. we are confronted with a “double-bottomed” petrarchism, as it were, one in which the direct citation, remodulated in a conversational cadence that plays with emphasis only to continually disprove it, appears functional to a thematic or ideological anti-petrarchism that can be explored assuming time as the main theme, revisited in the light of a present whose dimension of tragedy has been denied. and in light of these preliminary observations we may consider the poem “un’altra risorta,” of the third section of i colloqui, taking it as a significant moment in the twentieth-century reception of the memorable sonnet 35 of the rerum vulgarium fragmenta. * * * * * “un’altra risorta” is composed in the metrical scheme of sesta rima, in which the six hendecasyllables are connected by two rhymes arranged in various ways. it is one of the metrical schemes gozzano loved and used most (martelli 608-609); he took it from d’annunzio’s chimera and experimented with it already in the second version of la signorina felicita, though varying the scheme of the rhymes in a sort of free reinterpretation of the sirma of the sonnet. “un’altra risorta” was first published with the title “novembre” in the review la riviera ligure in february 1910, and then again in 1911 with its definitive title; it creates a sort of diptych with the preceding poem “una risorta,” in the section of i colloqui headed il reduce. the word risorta, in its meaning of the sudden appearance of a person after a long period of absence, is a unicum in our literary tradition (battaglia 845-46) and sets us straightaway inside a story. suggesting by lexical affinity the idea of a sortie and an ambush, it signals an epiphany, again of a woman, the same woman of the previous text, who unexpectedly joins her lover, a distracted flâneur who is aimlessly wandering the city streets. she catches up humanist studies & the digital age alessandra mantovani 1.1 winter 2011 214 with him and, strolling along, forces him into a conversation about the comparison of two destinies, against the backdrop of the ineluctable passage of time. this poem was long ago identified as a paradigmatic text of gozzano’s petrarchism (guglielminetti 182-84). first, the event that is recounted is set explicitly within a petrarchesque framework—“penso al petrarca che raggiunto fu / per via, da laura, com’io son da lei…”—and, along with “totò merùmeni,” it is the only direct reference to laura’s poet. second, and especially, it displays in limine an extensive citation—“poi l’ombra apparve, e la conobbi in terra …/ tremante a guisa d’uom ch’aspetta guerra, / mi volsi e vidi…”—which leads us directly to sonnet 110 of the rerum vulgarium fragmenta, of which gozzano’s poem uses either half-lines or entire verses, within a coherent system of lexical variations and dislocations which is in great part as yet unexplored. in fact the repertoire of citations included in the quaderno petrarchesco offers a definite confirmation of a working method that must be recognized and reconstructed also for how it materializes concretely in the creative phase. as a matter of fact, gozzano’s way of invoking the canzoniere almost never takes the form of a “bi-univocal” correspondence, as it were, in which the second-degree word replicates in itself the voice of a single text. instead, the direct citation seems embedded within a halo of multiple echoes or resonances, less explicit but no less urgent, almost a scattering of traces, a mosaic-like texture that refracts within the word of the text the multiple voices and places of its very model. this is the case of “un’altra risorta,” a poem in which the unequivocal presence of sonnet 110 is placed, like a puzzle, within a narrative framework: an encounter not entirely expected, even if predictable and only partly desired, in a state of solitude which is willingly but vainly pursued— in fact, the state of sonnet 35, “solo et pensoso i più deserti campi.” we may identify, scattered in the text, lexical echoes that are precise one moment and appropriately reformulated the next (barberi squarotti 224). let us compare the two texts in full (see appendix for a translation of “un’altra risorta”): solo, errando così come chi erra senza meta, un po’ triste, a passi stanchi, udivo un passo frettoloso ai fianchi; poi l’ombra apparve, e la conobbi in terra…. tremante a guisa d’uom ch’aspetta guerra, mi volsi e vidi i suoi capelli: bianchi. ma fu l’incontro mesto, e non amaro. proseguimmo tra l’oro delle acace del valentino, camminando a paro. ella parlava, tenera, loquace, del passato, di sé, della sua pace, del futuro, di me, del giorno chiaro. «che bel novembre! e’ come una menzogna primaverile! e lei, compagno inerte, solo et pensoso i più deserti campi vo mesurando a passi tardi et lenti, et gli occhi porto per fuggire intenti ove vestigio human l’arena stampi. altro schermo non trovo che mi scampi dal manifesto accorger de le genti, perché negli atti d’alegrezza spenti di fuor si legge com’io dentro avampi: sí ch’io mi credo omai che monti et piagge et fiumi et selve sappian di che tempre sia la mia vita, ch’è celata altrui. ma pur sí aspre vie né sí selvagge humanist studies & the digital age alessandra mantovani 1.1 winter 2011 215 se ne va solo per le vie deserte, col trasognato viso di chi sogna…. fare bisogna. vivere bisogna la bella vita dalle mille offerte». «le mille offerte….oh! vana fantasia! solo in disparte dalla molta gente, ritrovo i sogni e le mie fedi spente, solo in disparte l’anima s’oblìa…. vivo in campagna, con una prozia, la madre inferma ed uno zio demente. sono felice.la mia vita è tanto pari al mio sogno; il sogno che non varia: vivere in una villa solitaria, senza passato più, senza rimpianto: appartenersi, meditare….canto l’esilio e la rinuncia volontaria». «ah! lasci la rinuncia che non dico, lasci l’esilio a me, lasci l’oblío a me che rassegnata già m’avvio prigioniera del tempo, del nemico…. dove lei sale c’è la luce, amico! dov’io scendo c’è l’ombra, amico mio!...» ed era lei che mi parlava, quella che risorgeva dal passato eterno sulle tepide soglie dell’inverno?... la quarantina la faceva bella, diversamente bella: una sorella buona, dall’occhio tenero materno. tacevo, preso dalla grazia immensa di quel profilo forte che m’adesca; tra il cupo argento della chioma densa ella appariva giovenile e fresca come una deità settecentesca…. «amico neghittoso, a che mai pensa?». «penso al petrarca che raggiunto fu per via, da laura com’io son da lei….» sorrise, rise discoprendo i bei denti….«che laura in fior di gioventù!... irriverente!...pensi invece ai miei capelli grigi….non mi tingo più.» (gozzano, tutte le poesie) cercar non so ch’amor non venga sempre ragionando con meco, et io co llui. (petrarca, rvf 35) humanist studies & the digital age alessandra mantovani 1.1 winter 2011 216 petrarch’s synonymic dittology “solo et pensoso” appears halved in the adjective “solo” which however retains a highly evocative valence, both because of its metrical position and because it is scattered, like a primitive lexical and rhythmic cell, in the third and fourth strophes (“se ne va solo per le vie deserte”; “solo in disparte dalla molta gente”; “solo in disparte l’anima s’oblia…”). the adjective “pensoso” is modified into “un po’ triste,” a variatio that complies with the criterion of prose-like paraphrase of the early text, in an anticourtly reformulation that we see in other expressions as well: “a passi stanchi” instead of “a passi tardi e lenti,” which eliminates the eurythmic duplication of the adjective, which is however reproduced as a more general syntactic move in the following line, “ma fu l’incontro mesto e non amaro.” at the same time, the situation of meditative solitude immediately undergoes the unexpected interference of the “passo frettoloso ai fianchi,” which is the modern and ordinary version of the undesired “vestigio human” and which emphasizes the antinomy between the early text and the modern one. similarly, the brilliant and synthetic progressive form “vo mesurando” expands into the conversational and diffuse “errando così come chi erra / senza meta.” similarly “i più deserti campi” are transformed into “vie deserte,” which render in a flatter and more denotative vocabulary, although still literarily characterized by the general layout of the verse—“se ne va solo per le vie deserte”—the modern situation of urban solitude expressed as a wandering which is not languid but only “inerte,” or to quote leopardi “neghittoso” (leopardi 219). the petrarchan use of the multiplicative plural “genti,” in which the lofty echo of the latin lemma resounds, in order to express an aspiration to introspective solitude—“altro schermo non trovo che mi scampi / dal manifesto accorger de le genti”—makes way for the prosaic and merely descriptive “solo in disparte dalla molta gente.” in this phrase the flight from the tittle-tattle of everyday life in search of a new authenticity—“ritrovo i sogni e le mie fedi spente, / solo in disparte l’anima s’oblia”—suggests yet again, carried by the rhyme and by the mechanisms of a “rhythmic memory” (contini un’idea 83-87) (“gente/spente”), a recognizable petrarchan echo (“genti / perché negli atti d’alegrezza spenti”). the existential choice of aridity and indifference on the part of the modern lyric “i” (“canto / l’esilio e la rinuncia volontaria…”), here an avowed alter ego of “totò merùmeni,” is set in a neglected space of abandonment and bizarre marginality in which petrarchan words of solitude, from “deserti campi” to the polysyndetic series of “monti et piagge / et fiumi et selve” are declined to a minor and merely referential key in “vivo in campagna, con una prozia, / la madre inferma ed uno zio demente.” moreover, in gozzano’s text we find both a revival and at the same time a radical transformation of the archetype’s “narrative” situation. if in sonnet 35 the solitude that the subject seeks becomes an endless dialogue with love (“ch’amor non venga sempre / ragionando con meco, et io co llui”) in “un’altra risorta” the conversation takes place with the woman who suddenly appears, “camminando a paro,” to disrupt the dreamer’s meditative idleness. thus the synthetic efficacy of the personal pronouns, in the dual humanist studies & the digital age alessandra mantovani 1.1 winter 2011 217 figures of chiasmus and antithesis (“amor—con meco / io—co llui”), extends into a gradatio which is only apparently digressive and introduces a disconsolate meditation on time— “ella parlava, tenera, loquace, / del passato, di sé, della sua pace / del futuro, di me, del giorno chiaro”. for this reason the situation of the modern poem is very different from that of sonnet 110, which yet serves as a model for it. in sonnet 110 laura’s appearance still occurs as a divine epiphany that reveals itself in her greeting, through the radiance of her eyes, “più degna d’immortale stato.” in the colloqui, instead, the rhythmical-prosodic norm operative in petrarch’s original is disregarded, and, introduced by a linearly colloquial expression— “mi volsi e vidi i suoi capelli bianchi”—we find the image of a woman who appears literally “invasa dal tempo.” unlike petrarch’s laura, who faces a destiny of death but is the object of a love that coincides with the very life of her lover and, transfigured, prevails beyond the boundaries of human time, the woman in gozzano’s poem survives the death of love and bears in herself the stigmata of time. thus it is not death that celebrates, as in petrarch, its own triumph over love and over the woman, but it is time that triumphs over a woman who survives her own aging. hence the younger lover, sick with indifference and unable to love, rediscovers in the deathly certainty of a temporality beyond redemption a new possibility for a relationship, one in which an emotional dimension no longer the slave of sensuality transfigures the potential enemy into “una sorella / buona, dall’occhio tenero materno.” there is no doubt that, in the invocation of a woman both mother and sister, pascoli has great influence and, even more so, gozzano’s proximity to the d’annunzio of “poema paradisiaco” and of the novels as well (sanguineti 51-60), models which are present in various ways in “un’altra risorta.” we need only consider the original title “novembre” which, describing a day of miraculous sun just before winter—“che bel novembre! e’ come una menzogna/ primaverile!”—recalls the poem from myricae about “l’estate fredda dei morti” (pascoli 272), evoked in the most allusive and secretive texture of the rhymes. we might also recall the discursive modulation of the hendecasyllable, which in gozzano is interrupted by punctuation and littered with suspensions and conventional interjections of dialogic interiority, in which pascoli’s revolutionary metrics is easily recognizable (contini varianti 596-97). d’annunzio’s model in turn operates both in the portrayal of the female figure—in the seductive version of the refined companion who chats while strolling along the park boulevards, or in the more modest version of parental benevolence—and in the evocation, immediately denied, of the vital impulse (“fare bisogna. vivere bisogna / la bella vita dalle mille offerte”) in which the voice of the poet of “maia” resounds recognizably. nonetheless, however evident the influence of a more recent poetic, we can yet state that even in the second part of the poem, less noticeably marked by petrarchan borrowings, what counts the most on both a structural and a linguistic level is, again, il canzoniere. il canzoniere is set in the “first degree” narrative framework of the solitary walk and sets itself humanist studies & the digital age alessandra mantovani 1.1 winter 2011 218 up as the primary model and catalyzing element of modern invention for both the form of its content and the form of its expression. in the characterization of a woman who is “diversamente bella,” with a “materno” look of “sorella buona.” capable of “adescare” (“luring”) in a new way those who look at her by virtue of a charm that does not hide the passing of the years, “un’altra risorta” displays an originality of lexical choices vis-à-vis gozzano’s poetry (savoca 283), an originality attributable precisely to the palimpsest of references to other poems of the rerum vulgarium fragmenta, prompted by the theme of the lover’s aging. the encounter between love and chastity which petrarch’s desire had prefigured— imagining an old age that, “cangiati i volti, et l’una et l’altra coma,” would at last have made possible a confidential conversation between the lovers—presents the modern poet with multiple possibilities for intertextual references which thread into the theme of physical transformation a new, more serene possibility of relationship. thus imagining a more mature age, in petrarch a projection of his desire in which beauty is finally dimmed by time, locks of greying hair (“e i cape’ d’oro fin farsi d’argento”) might belatedly appease passion by offering “il soccorso di tardi sospiri.” gozzano, on the other hand, encounters the more humble and human reality of a woman who has outlived her own youth. it is her hair, “bianchi” or “grigi,” transfigured in a petrarch-like manner into the “cupo argento della chioma densa,” that marks the distance between a literary archetype and a present neither sublime nor tragic. it is again petrarch’s poem which superimposes over the image of winter the existential image of old age and over the belied hypothesis of a weakening of desire the image of a different beauty that is still fascinating—“quel foco ch’i’ pensai che fosse spento / dal freddo tempo et da l’età men fresca, / fiamma e martir ne l’anima rinfresca. … et tende lacci in sì diverse tempre, / che quand’ò più speranza che il cor n’esca, / allor più nel bel viso mi rinvesca.” and it is again petrarch’s poem that suggests to the modern poet a lexical texture which alludes to a different, however improbable, seduction: “ed era lei che mi parlava, quella / che risorgeva dal passato eterno / sulle tepide soglie dell’inverno?... / la quarantina la faceva bella, diversamente bella … tacevo, preso dalla grazia immensa/ di quel profilo forte che m’adesca:/ tra il cupo argento della chioma densa/ ella appariva giovenile e fresca / come una deità settecentesca….” the absence of irony is made possible by means of a fate that acknowledges not the tragedy of death, but only the honest, grey deterioration of old age. to mark the distance between laura and the modern woman, who shows her age without embarrassment or sorrow, in the composed display of a middle-class and quotidian ordinariness—“non mi tingo più”—is however, once again, petrarch’s phrasing. the dream of a passion at last tempered by the years—“et era giunto al loco / ove scende la vita ch’al fin cade”—and shattered by the woman’s death—“morte ebbe invidia al mio felice stato / anzi a la speme; et feglisi a l’incontra / a mezza via come nemico armato”—works in gozzano to describe the decline of an existence whose real enemy is time—“prigioniera del tempo, del nemico”— into whose “shadow” horizon the woman is fated to descend. humanist studies & the digital age alessandra mantovani 1.1 winter 2011 219 “laura in fior di gioventù” and her younger friend—a modern, skeptical, disillusioned francesco—have both been betrayed by love and by death. true children of “tempo nostro,” they are destined neither for greatness nor for heroism, nor for the tragedy to which the sublime of literature was able to give voice. however, on that very literature and the miraculous authenticity of tones of which it was capable in the words of its classics, the modern poet still lives, if only to proclaim his own “esilio” and irremediable distance from it. in fact, it is no accident that guido gozzano’s quaderno petrarchesco ends, after having excerpted the verses of the “canzone alla vergine,” with the modern poet’s voice, which opposes to the existential trajectory of the canzoniere’s poet the diversity without redemption of his own fate: “ma il fanciullo che è in me non puoi ferirlo / lo ferisci / il tuo profumo: la malinconia” (guglielminetti and masoero 210). on the other hand, a poetry that originates as the voice of a self that wishes “no longer to be myself” (“più essere io”) and alienates itself in the image of the other—“e già mi sento lui”—cannot fail to perceive the fascination, or the curse, of a literary tradition whose profound dynamics is, to quote harold bloom, to reopen old works to our new sufferings, if it is true that literature, when it becomes a metaphor of itself, dwells in the “desire of being elsewhere” (bloom 9-10). appendix: another woman reborn walking alone, like one who drifts around aimlessly, and a little sad and tired, i heard a hurried footstep on my right; i recognised the shadow on the ground… i shook like one expecting war; i turned and, looking at her hair, saw it was white. the meeting was a mournful one, not bitter. we walked among the gold of the acacias, crossing the valentino close together. she was discussing, tender and loquacious, the past, herself, how times were now propitious, the future, me, the brilliance of the weather. “a beautiful november! telling lies, pretending to be spring! yet listlessly along these empty paths you take your way, your face abstracted by your reveries… really you ought to act. you ought to seize the thousand chances life presents today.” “the thousand chances… futile fantasy! only abstracted from the vulgar herd can i revive some dreams that i thought dead, only relaxed when not in company… humanist studies & the digital age alessandra mantovani 1.1 winter 2011 220 outside the town a great-aunt lives with me, a mother who is sick, an uncle, mad. i’m happy now. my life is made to fit that dream which knows no shade of alteration: to have a villa, living in seclusion; by now without a past, without regret; to be one’s own man; think… i celebrate exile and voluntary renunciation.” “renounce renunciation with no name, and leave both exile and oblivion to me; resignedly i travel on, the captive of our enemy, of time… you rise, my friend, towards a distant gleam! i drop into a place whence light has gone!” and she who talked to me was one who rose out of the everlasting past! i found her just on the tepid threshold of the winter!... she was more beautiful by forty years, with different beauty, sisterly, her eyes tending to motherly and very tender. i did not speak a word; i was spellbound: that powerful profile still bewitches me; her abundant hair was silver-shaded, and she still looked young and fresh; she seemed to be some goddess of the eighteenth century… “whatever are you thinking, lazy friend?” “of petrarch overtaken on the road by laura, as i am by you…” and then she smiled and laughed and showed her very fine white teeth… “so i am laura in the pride of youth?... you’re mocking me!... this hair of mine is grey, you’re thinking, now it isn’t dyed.” (gozzano, colloquies and selected letters, 82-83; ellipses in original) 1 translated by diana gasbarri. 2 masoero cites s. gotta, guido gozzano, «amicizia», agosto 1966, p. 10. humanist studies & the digital age alessandra mantovani 1.1 winter 2011 221 3 nichols’ translation (colloquies and selected letters 24): “now i do not live. / only, frozen and set apart, in him / i have to smile to see myself alive.” works cited asor rosa, alberto. “avanguardia.” enciclopedia. vol. 2. torino: einaudi, 1977. print. barberi squarotti, giorgio. “introduction, notes and commentary.” poesie. by guido gozzano. milano: rizzoli, 1985. print. battaglia, salvatore, ed. grande dizionario della lingua italiana. vol. 16. torino: utet, 1992. print. bloom, harold. il canone occidentale. i libri e le scuole delle età. trans. francesco saba sardi. milano: bompiani, 2000. print. calcaterra, carlo. “modi petrarcheschi nell’arte del gozzano.” studi petrarcheschi 1 (1948): 213-23. print. contini, gianfranco. un’idea di dante. torino: einaudi, 1976. print. ---. varianti e altra linguistica. torino: einaudi, 1984. print. cortellessa, andrea, ed. un’altra storia. petrarca nel novecento italiano. roma: bulzoni, 2005. print. finotti, fabio. “la rivincita della letteratura. la ‘funzione petrarca’ in carducci e nell’età del metodo storico.” il petrarchismo nel settecento e nell’ottocento. eds. sandro gentili, and luigi trenti. roma: bulzoni, 2006. 251-71. print. gozzano, guido. the colloquies and selected letters. trans. j. g. nichols. new york: carcanet, 1987. print. ---. tutte le poesie. ed. marziano guglielminetti. milano: mondadori, 1980. print. guglielminetti, marziano, and mariarosa masoero, eds. petrarca e il petrarchismo contemporaneo. torino: giappichelli, 1975. print. guglielminetti, marziano, and mariarosa masoero. “spogli danteschi e petrarcheschi di guido gozzano.” otto-novecento 6 (1982): 169-258. print. guglielminetti, marziano, ed. petrarca e il petrarchismo. un’ideologia della letteratura. torino: paravia, 1977. print. leopardi, giacomo. canti. eds. mario fubini, and emilio bigi. torino: loescher, 1980. print. lorenzini, niva. la poesia italiana del novecento. bologna: il mulino, 1999. print. martelli, mario. “le forme poetiche dal cinquecento ai nostri giorni.” letteratura italiana. le forme del testo. i teoria e poesia. vol. 3. torino: einaudi, 1984. 519-620. print. masoero, mariarosa. guido gozzano. libri e lettere. firenze: olschki, 2005. print. humanist studies & the digital age alessandra mantovani 1.1 winter 2011 222 montale, eugenio. tutte le poesie. milano: mondadori, 1977. print. pascoli, giovanni. myricae. milano: rizzoli, 1981. print. petrarca, francesco. canzoniere. eds. gianfranco contini, and daniele ponchiroli. torino: einaudi, 1982. print. rosenberg, harold. la sdefinizione dell’arte. trans. maurizio vitta. milano: feltrinelli, 1975. print. saba, umberto. prose. milano: mondadori, 1964. print. sanguineti, edoardo. guido gozzano. indagini e letture. torino: einaudi, 1975. print. santagata, marco, i frammenti dell' anima, storia e racconto nel canzoniere di petrarca. bologna: il mulino, 1983. print. savoca, giuseppe, ed. concordanza di tutte le poesie di guido gozzano. firenze: olschki, 1984. print. serra, renato. scritti letterari morali e politici. torino: einaudi, 1974. print. trenti, luigi. “riflessioni leopardiane su petrarca.” il petrarchismo nel settecento e nell’ottocento. eds. sandro gentili, and luigi trenti. roma: bulzoni, 2006. 137-67. print. ghosts of solitude: guido gozzano, reader of petrarch. an episode of the twentieth-century reception of rvf 35 alessandra mantovani, university of bologna0f appendix: another woman reborn works cited humanist studies & the digital age, 2.1 (2012) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.2.1.2996 57 testo tempo verità domenico fiormonte università roma tre abstract: this article tries to show the strict interdependence of the concepts of text, time, and truth in relation to textual transmission. it develops the thesis that the identity of the text is a function of a series of actors working on the historic, cultural, religious, and other levels. it offers the example of the origination of the old testament, which is considered the real foundational act of western practices of identity construction/reconstruction. this event generated the metaphysics of the text that produced the overlapping of theological and philological truth. nonetheless, the digital dimension seems potentially able to call into crisis the pact of identity that is based on the assumed stability of the written document and the idea of time that derives from it. the present scenario sees a tension between the data preservation/retrieval paradigm and the creative/performative style of online writing. we are facing a dialogue and interaction with and between machines that the methods and traditional tools of the humanist sciences find increasingly difficult to understand, describe, and map. in questo articolo si cerca di mostrare la stretta interdipendenza dei concetti di testo, tempo e verità in relazione alla storia della trasmissione dei testi. viene avanzata la tesi che l’identità del testo sia funzione di una serie di attori che agiscono sul piano storico, culturale, religioso, ecc., e a tale proposito viene portato l’esempio della nascita dell’antico testamento, vero atto fondativo delle pratiche occidentali di costruzione/ricostruzione dell’identità. dalla metafisica del testo generata da questo evento scaturisce la sovrapposizione di verità teologica e verità filologica. ma la dimensione digitale sembra potenzialmente in grado di mettere in crisi il patto identitario fondato sulla presunta stabilità del documento scritto e sulla concezione tempo che ne deriva. lo scenario presente vede una tensione fra il paradigma della conservazione/retrieval dei dati e quello produttivo-performativo delle scritture online. un dialogo e un’interazione con e fra le macchine che i metodi e gli strumenti tradizionali delle scienze umanistiche fanno sempre più fatica a comprendere, descrivere, mappare. [nisargadatta] maharaj said quite often that books get written; they are never written by authors. only a little thought is necessary to see the truth of what he meant. he was not referring only to books on spiritual matters; he was referring to humanist studies & the digital age domenico fiormonte 2.1 fall 2012 58 all books. in the overall functioning of the manifested universe, whatever was necessary as written or spoken words appeared spontaneously …. no credit or blame could attach to any individual writer for the simple reason that the individual is a mere illusion and has not autonomous existence. ramesh s. balsekar, experience of immortality. e varrebbe la pena di ripercorrere la storia dell’edizione dei testi in rapporto con le diverse concezioni di verità, e perciò dell’autorità da conferire ai testi stessi. qui n è possibile. cesare segre, avviamento all’analisi del testo letterario. introduzione: tre giganti incatenati pubblico per la prima volta in italiano questo contributo che – in omaggio alla mobilità che dà il titolo al nostro volume – ha subito nel tempo una serie di modificazioni1. mi accingo a connettere insieme tre parole il cui suono fa già tremare i polsi: testo tempo verità. che cosa unisce, almeno nella mia prospettiva, questi tre giganti incatenati (e non solo perché privi di interpunzione delimitatoria)? quello che cercherò di abbozzare è l’origine e l’ubi consistam della concezione universalista e monologica del testo. ovviamente è sopra (e sotto) il testo che troviamo il tempo, senza il quale non esiste né testo né verità. mi limiterò a illustrare il legame fra verità testuale e relativa concezione del tempo attraverso l’uso di alcune “scene,” rinunciando a sostenere un’argomentazione rigorosa, se non nel senso che gli attribuisce olivier reboul, quando definisce l’argomentazione un metodo a metà strada “fra il necessario e l’arbitrario” (reboul 102). la mancanza qui e lì di nessi, qualche interpolazione (vedi esergo) e la presenza di ambiguità espositive, testimoniano che questo lavoro è e non può che rimanere precario, programmaticamente instabile e aperto. 1. assalto alla maestà manuali e dizionari in genere ci forniscono tre classi di definizioni del – o informazioni sul – testo:  un’etimologia: la parola deriva dal latino “textus” che significa tessuto. si tratta quindi di qualcosa che sta insieme, le cui parti sono strettamente intrecciate tra loro;  un’ipotesi: il testo è anche ciò che viene prodotto e scambiato in una comunicazione linguistica;  una definizione: il testo è una produzione linguistica, scritta o orale, realizzata con l’intenzione e l’effetto di comunicare qualcosa a qualcuno. sin qui nulla che richiami direttamente la nozione di “verità” (indugerò molto in questo intervento sull’ambiguità fra “verità testuale” e “testo veritiero,” poiché le due espressioni sono forse logicamente, ma non storicamente distanti). il problema della “verità” del testo humanist studies & the digital age domenico fiormonte 2.1 fall 2012 59 infatti viene introdotto a un certo punto della storia, quando la scrittura comincia a solidificarsi in prodotti stabili – o almeno percepiti come tali (jaynes 218-249). il testo cioè non è più un supporto della comunicazione orale o una funzione di contesti sociali, religiosi, ecc., ma acquista una sua indipendenza. come sappiamo questa “indipendenza,” che è la forza del testo, rappresenta per platone insieme un pericolo e il suo limite più grande: e infatti egli attacca “il discorso muto” della scrittura contrapponendolo alla parola viva (la “verità” si raggiunge solo dialetticamente). ma quando accade che la verità smette di essere dialettica e viene consegnata al testo? una riflessione che affonda le sue radici negli anni trenta del secolo scorso (da walter benjamin a paul valèry), e che culmina negli anni cinquanta e sessanta (da harold innis a marshall mcluhan) è concorde nell’identificare lo spartiacque nell’invenzione e diffusione della stampa. lo stesso concetto di “autore,” che si svilupperà e culminerà nel romanticismo (woodmansee 35-55), nasce grazie alla diffusione in più copie identiche dello stesso oggetto-libro. insomma riproducibilità, oggi come ieri, è sinonimo di identità (mordenti). tuttavia la nozione di verità del testo, nel senso più puramente teo-filologico, sembra essere assai più antica e soprattutto più legata alle radici della nostra cultura: ora, o re, emana il decreto e fallo mettere per iscritto, perché sia irrevocabile, come sono le leggi di media e di persia che non si possono mutare. (daniele, 6, 9) 2 i satrapi del regno di dario sono invidiosi di daniele, prediletto del re e promosso ad alti incarichi. l’unico modo per incastrarlo è colpirlo nella pratica della fede: pretesto per l’accusa diventerà la sua preghiera rituale nel momento in cui si chiede che essa diventi illegale. è perciò che i nemici di daniele convincono il re babilonese a emanare un decreto in cui si stabilisce che chiunque “rivolga supplica alcuna a dio o uomo all’infuori del re” deve essere gettato nella fossa dei leoni, ma soprattutto sanciscono che debba essere firmato perché diventi “irrevocabile.” se questa è una delle testimonianze più belle della fondazione della “stabilità” del testo, l’episodio ne testimonia tutta l’ambiguità e la potenza contraddittoria. il potere qui si incarna nel testo “pubblicato” che diventa sinonimo di “immutabile.” ma questo stesso potere è vittima del testo, cioè di un sé scagliato su un supporto: il re dario, che pure ama e rispetta daniele, sarà costretto a far eseguire il decreto che ha lui stesso promulgato. la maestà del testo è superiore alla maestà della persona. anche il più potente dei re, di fronte al testo, si deve inchinare. la parola, lontana da chi l’ha proferita, è una condanna. ma anche una garanzia per chi l’ascolta. la lezione dei nemici di daniele, tuttavia, servì allo scopo. è proprio al tempo della cattività babilonese (qui reale, là mitema) infatti che gli ebrei elaborano il loro testo. la cui maestà sarà destinata ad avere effetti ben più profondi di una condanna a morte. mario liverani, nel suo antico oriente. storia, società, economia, sintetizza la nota questione della “composizione” dell’antico testamento. si tratta di una vicenda assai complessa che riassumerò per sommi capi (lo stesso liverani la narra in modo più esteso in oltre la bibbia). in sostanza, in seguito alle invasioni assiro-babilonesi del regno di israele humanist studies & the digital age domenico fiormonte 2.1 fall 2012 60 (viii-vi sec. a.c.), avvengono successive ondate di deportazioni delle élites giudee nei territori dei conquistatori: nabucodonosor espugna gerusalemme una prima volta, riducendola alla condizione di regno vassallo (597), e poi una seconda volta ponendo fino all’autonomia locale (586). ... e mentre i deportati in altre zone assire venivano fusi (anche forzosamente) alle popolazioni locali, gli esuli giudei in babilonia mantennero maggiore coesione e individualità.” (liverani, antico oriente 680-681) dunque assistiamo a un doppio movimento di popolazioni, deportati in arrivo, che “portarono le loro divinità e le loro costumanze” in palestina (682) ed élites palatine o templari che cercano di perpetuare nell’esilio babilonese “la purezza della loro lingua, delle loro costumanze, della loro religione, per difendersi dall’assimilazione” (682). ivi compresi i testi sacri. a questo punto però avviene qualcosa di singolare, ovvero gli esiliati tornando nella loro terra notano che le antiche tradizioni sono scomparse o si sono corrotte, insomma non la “riconoscono”. e cominciano a considerarsi, in quanto scampati al disastro nazionale, gli unici eredi legittimi. essi “restaurano tempio e legge, vietano matrimoni misti e sincretismo religioso, considerano illegittima la presenza sul territorio di coloro che non fanno parte della comunità religiosa yahwistica...” (687). è a partire da questo momento che inizia quella che liverani chiama la “rifondazione storiografica”, ovvero l’operazione di riscrittura della storia di israele in chiave nazional-religiosa: ricollocando alle epoche di redazione i singoli interventi testuali che assommati insieme costituiscono l’antico testamento, ci si accorge che la maggior parte di essi si colloca ... in epoca post-esilica (dunque in età achemenide ed ellenistica) – e in misura minore proprio ai limiti estremi di essa, in età esilica. certamente il complesso dell’antico testamento è da valutarsi e da apprezzarsi più nella prospettiva del secondo tempio che non del primo, più nel quadro del ritorno dall’esilio che non della formazione e dello sviluppo del regno di israele, e costituisce un caso colossale di ripensamento della storia passata, e di una sua riscrittura, in funzione del presente (un presente assai posteriore alla storia narrata) (liverani, antico oriente 690). siamo insomma di fronte a un caso, forse il più eclatante, in cui l’identità del testo è funzione del suo contesto culturale (religioso in questo caso). più di due millenni prima di google assistiamo a un episodio di manipolazione retroattiva delle forme di (auto) rappresentazione della realtà – i testi – che avrà conseguenze inimmaginabili nella storia dell’occidente. il tempo del testo diviene il tempo dell’uomo. 2. i rinnegati del testo il consolidarsi e rapprendersi dei prodotti dello spirito su un supporto materiale che i poteri non sono estranei nel rendere sempre più stabile e sempre più fisso (innis), produce quella rivoluzione della conoscenza nella quale siamo ancora immersi. vari secoli dopo la sua invenzione e diffusione, il testo, può essere così definito da un critico e filologo: humanist studies & the digital age domenico fiormonte 2.1 fall 2012 61 se consideriamo i segni grafici (lettere, interpunzione, ecc.) come significanti di suoni, pause, ecc., e riflettiamo sul fatto che questi segni possono essere trascritti più volte e in vari modi (per esempio con grafia e caratteri diversi), restandone immutato il valore, possiamo concludere che il testo è l’invariante, la successione di valori, rispetto alle variabili dei caratteri, della scrittura, ecc. … il testo è dunque una successione fissa di segni grafici. questi significati grafici sono poi portatori di significati semantici …; ma occorre insistere in partenza su questa costituzione originaria. occorre insistervi, perché le ricchissime, praticamente infinite implicazioni di un testo, quelle che richiamano lettori ai testi anche per secoli e millenni, sono tutte racchiuse nella letteralità dei significati grafici. di qui l’importanza della filologia, che s’impegna nella conservazione il più possibile esatta di questi significati. il fatto che la sopravvivenza dei testi implichi inevitabili guasti nella loro trasmissione deve sollecitare ancor più lo sforzo di tutelarne la genuinità. (segre, avviamento 29-30; corsivi miei). 3 tralasciamo per un momento alcune lacune interne di questa lunga definizione (non si fa accenno, almeno qui, al ruolo autonomo della forma del testo, né alla sua dimensione pragmatica) e concentriamoci su tre parole chiave: testo come invariante, sua conservazione e genuinità. non siamo ancora alla “verità” ma ci stiamo avvicinando (e non solo per allitterazione). immagino che per alcuni apparirà persino troppo scontato (oggi 2012 ma la prima edizione dell’avviamento è degli anni ottanta) che una parola come ‘invariante’ riferita a un testo rimandi a un mondo sepolto – per analogia e contrasto vengono subito in mente le “scritture mutanti” della rete. restando alla definizione, considerare i segni grafici delle varianti che rimandano a un “valore immutato” vuol dire proiettare il testo in un iperuranio senza tempo; e d’altronde se, come viene ammesso, il testo può variare, allora com’è possibile che il suo valore possa rimanere immutato nel tempo? da dove verrebbe attinta questa sua intangibilità? tuttavia trattare con sufficienza questa definizione sarebbe avventato – e soprattutto pericoloso. perché, in realtà, siamo di fronte all’unica concezione del testo riconosciuta come tale dalla disciplina che al testo ha dedicato immensi sforzi teorici e applicativi, ottenendo i più grandi e duraturi risultati: la filologia. e questa disciplina, regina delle discipline storiche e vanto delle scienze umanistiche, per quanto acciaccata e in crisi, è ancora oggi, a più di un secolo dagli strali di nietzsche, la dominatrice e custode dei metodi di rappresentazione, produzione e gestione della conoscenza scritta. cioè, almeno per la civiltà occidentale, della conoscenza tout court. con tutto ciò che consegue a livello sociale, politico, economico, culturale: leggi e carte costituzionali, contratti di matrimonio e polizze sulla vita, computer e giornali, reti autostradali e civiltà urbane. queste conquiste – se così vogliamo chiamarle – sorgono dal patto fondato sul documento scritto, il corpo-monumento, che viene inciso, scolpito, reso pubblico, ma raramente vissuto. si comprende dunque perché sempre segre, che pure venti anni prima aveva definito il testo come “un concetto limite,” (segre, avviamento 362) scrive nel 2001: humanist studies & the digital age domenico fiormonte 2.1 fall 2012 62 il testo è tutto il nostro bene; nessuna nostra escogitazione per quanto brillante o suggestiva può valere e significare di più del testo nella sua maestà. questa maestà coincide con la verità, che è nostro dovere perseguire con impegno, nel testo e ovunque. potrebbe essere questo il primo comandamento in una specie di giuramento di ippocrate dei critici letterari. e non mi dispiace che nell’imperversare irrefrenabile dei mass media, nel trionfo della virtualità, nell’assordante sovrapposizione di voci e parole ormai dissanguate del loro senso, ci siano discipline che contengano un insegnamento, oltre che metodologico, anche deontologico. (segre, ritorno alla critica 99) ecco è apparsa “la verità”. però non riluce, non illumina e sembra anzi piuttosto minacciosa. il testo diventa il solo orizzonte etico, anzi si incarna e si identifica con l’etica stessa. siamo ben oltre la ricostruzione della “verità testuale”. chi è fuori dal testo, non solo non possiede la verità (letterale e a questo punto spirituale del testo), ma è bandito dal consorzio umano. è un rinnegato. è questa l’inevitabile parabola della religione del testo: imbastire alla contemporaneità il processo per eresia. luciano canfora ha dedicato un pamphlet al problema della condanna della critica testuale da parte della chiesa cattolica (ma problemi analoghi si riscontrano in altre confessioni), legando i destini della filologia alla possibilità stessa di esercitare il pensiero critico. titolo e sottotitolo del saggio sono già una tesi: filologia e libertà. la più eversiva delle discipline, l’indipendenza di pensiero e il diritto alla verità. ma anche in questo caso si parla di verità: certo si tratta di una verità costruita, almeno idealmente, nel confronto libero delle opinioni e attraverso studi rigorosi, storicamente fondati. alla fine però il rischio è che si tratti di un atto di fede ontologicamente affine; come nell’antico testamento, terreno di lotta fra due verità, quella critico-testuale e quella teologica (barbaglia, “la rilevanza ermeneutica”; prato, “gli scritti biblici”). sarebbe ingiusto negare ai filologi il desiderio di libertà o attribuirgli un eccesso di conservatorismo. ciò di cui parlano segre e canfora è naturalmente l’accettabilità e l’accertabilità di un testo. e accettabilità non vuol dire verità. tuttavia l’accettabilità presuppone un circuito che a sua volta comporta l’introduzione di gerarchie, sistemi di valutazione (la falsificabilità dell’esperimento) e in definitiva giudizi. e la filologia in fondo non è altro che una teoria del giudizio. dunque il problema della verità teologica, uscito dalla porta, rientra dalla finestra: chi stabilisce, infatti, le gerarchie? chi dovrebbe garantire la democraticità e scientificità dei metodi, se non un’altra comunità, che nel corso tempo si potrà costituire inesorabilmente come casta? il metodo, il percorso, non è mai neutrale. e persecutori e perseguitati alla fine si ritrovano intrappolati nello stesso labirinto seriale. 3. tempus digitale a dire il vero, anche all’interno della filologia, qualcuno aveva iniziato a reagire all’orizzonte apocalittico prospettato poco sopra. la filologia della “frattura e degli scarti”, invocata da corrado bologna, e il rispetto per la “verità dei fruitori”, di cui parla roberto antonelli (“spazio, tempo e testualità”), sono un onesto tentativo di salvare il salvabile, humanist studies & the digital age domenico fiormonte 2.1 fall 2012 63 ovvero la varietà storica del documento, legata al contesto dinamico della cultura in cui quel documento nasce e si “sviluppa”. grazie a questi e altri studiosi 4 è emersa, attraverso uno studio più attento dei supporti e degli elementi visuali e materiali della scrittura (storey), una concezione dinamica del testo, che non viene più solo considerato come un prodotto, ma come un processo. partendo da considerazioni simili, ma confrontandosi più esplicitamente con l’antropologia culturale, benozzo propone di fondare un’etnofilologia, ovvero lo studio dell’insieme dei processi e dei contesti che conducono alla fissazione dell’artefatto culturale (35-63). credo non sia sbagliato ipotizzare che la comparsa del supporto digitale abbia fornito un potente stimolo a queste riflessioni. e il problema del “riconoscimento e della costruzione” del dato (bologna 50), nell’incontro con l’informatica, diventa l’atto stesso di fondazione di una nuova disciplina neo-(post?)filologica: l’informatica umanistica. di fronte alla constatazione che l’informatica implica un ripensamento del nostro rapporto col dato, e di conseguenza del nostro modo di fare ricerca, è chiaro che il progetto di questa disciplina non potesse essere altro che quello di elaborare un nuovo quadro epistemologico. già alla fine degli anni ottanta alcuni filologi, tra cui ricordo raul mordenti, philip brockbank, peter robinson e francisco marcós marín, avevano cominciato a esprimere insoddisfazione per gli strumenti e le metodologie tradizionali della critica testuale, elaborando da diverse prospettive teoriche e culturali, modelli e prototipi di edizione elettronica. e nel mondo anglo-americano a partire dai primi anni novanta si sfornano a ritmo continuo prodotti e risorse che si pongono dichiaratamente non solo oltre l’edizione critica (mcgann), ma anche oltre il testo. pur essendo queste posizioni fra le più avanzate nel settore e pur avendo prodotto importanti risultati pratici e teorici, il processo di digitalizzazione implica traumi assai più profondi del riassetto della textual scholarship. la comunicazione digitale (di ciò stiamo parlando: perché il testo è stato costretto a cedere un po’ della sua “maestà”), va oltre l’orizzonte di ricostruzione storico-critica. il progetto che ho dedicato qualche anno fa a valerio magrelli è un esempio di che cosa può accadere nel momento in cui si avvia, nella cornice digitale, una qualsiasi procedura per la creazione di un oggetto di comunicazione complesso (e ciò anche al di là delle mie intenzioni iniziali). la magrelli genetic machine 5 non è infatti solo un modo di rappresentare la genesi di un testo già pubblicato, già scritto (le differenti manifestations come le chiama shillingsburg, ma un oggetto indipendente, un nuovo inter-testo. forse un testo che mentre si guarda, si riscrive. si tratta forse di una ‘ipotesi di lavoro’, come venivano definite alcune edizioni critiche? ma l’edizione critica era ed è ideologicamente legata alla ricostruzione dell’originale perduto o della volontà autoriale. lì il filologo scandaglia l’origine ed elabora cronologie6, qui l’autore si liquefà nel mare delle varianti; fluttua7, come dire, su sé stesso. se l’autore è uno, le scritture-letture sono molteplici. quale delle due (o delle tre) è illusione? oggi tali identità liquide vanno ben oltre l’orizzonte post-filologico e s’incarnano nelle forme di mashup 8 e remix del web 2.0, dove la nostra traccia si espande in una miriade di micro-testi alfanumerici: dai “mi piace” di facebook ai commenti ai blog, dai tweets alle etichette (folksonomies) con i quali descriviamo le risorse o i siti che visitiamo o archiviamo, ecc. una miriade di para, micro e humanist studies & the digital age domenico fiormonte 2.1 fall 2012 64 meta-testi che ci de-scrivono e dai e attraverso i quali siamo rappresentati (fiormonte, “pragmatica digitale”). parallelamente a questa quotidianità pervasiva abbiamo le forme “native” della scrittura digitale: spazi dove la scrittura, quella delle macchine e quella dell’uomo, si fanno azione nel tempo. sono un esempio le rappresentazioni interattive (costa fatica chiamarli videogame) come façade (http://www.interactivestory.net/) di michael mateas o le centinaia di sperimentazioni che ricadono sotto l’instabile definizione di digital literature (hayles; riva).9 una delle opere che mettono in scena performativamente questa processualizzazione, screen (http://www.noahwf.com/screen/index.html), è stata realizzata da noah wardrip-fruin presso la brown university. su una delle tre pareti (alle spalle non c’è nulla) viene proiettato e allo stesso tempo letto da una voce un testo poetico. dopo poco comincia l’interazione. parole singole o frasi intere si staccano dalle pareti come una pellicola e ci vengono incontro fluttuando. pur avendo visto e interagito con l’opera confesso che è difficile descriverne a parole l’intensità semiotica, aurale e cinetica. dall’altra parte abbiamo il lavoro di edizione dei testi che viene in qualche modo “illuminato” e al contempo scosso da queste forme post-testuali. le tecnologie di produzione non sono più disgiunte da quelle di conservazione. è come se il riflesso delle forme native di comunicazione digitale si riverberasse all’indietro, colpendo al cuore l’antico sistema di “valori”: modi, sguardi, metodologie. l’edizione critica e la sua (le sue) verità non crollano per effetto della digitalizzazione, ma perché questa ha fatto nascere forme di comunicazione, come accade ad esempio nella script act theory di peter shillingsburg (40-78), che “relativizzano,” o meglio circoscrivono la (le) “verità” di quelle precedenti, mostrandone i limiti – il bias culturale. è il processo descritto da innis, e poi da mcluhan, più di cinquanta anni fa. occorre a questo punto chiarire che quando parliamo di “limiti” del testo, non stiamo parlando soltanto di limiti intrinseci al medium o ai suoi prodotti – la letteratura. edward morgan forster diceva che i limiti della letteratura sono negli occhi con cui osserviamo la realtà (foster 165). ma purtroppo la vista di questi “occhi nuovi” viene stroncata sul nascere. la proiezione del passato sul futuro, incarnata nel paradigma della conservazione (oggi prevalente anche nelle digital humanities), è dal punto di vista etico l’inverso del continuo patteggiamento al quale è sottoposto ogni atto comunicativo (ivi inclusa la lettura di un testo). dietro la conservazione vi è lo “spirito sistematico”, al quale giorgio colli attribuisce il “disseccamento”10 della filosofia, che ha scelto come suoi strumenti la scrittura e oggi continua il suo dominio attraverso un’interpretazione teologico-tipografica della comunicazione digitale. non può essere un caso che il risultato della maggiore libertà di scambio – di comunicazione – nella rete ha prodotto legislazioni ancora più repressive di quelle del mondo della carta (vedi la european copyright directive o il digital millenium act negli usa). non nego il rischio che si può correre accogliendo in modo radicale queste tesi – né l’accusa di relativismo decostruzionista. insomma, il pericolo dell’oblio. ma d’altra parte non serve negare la possibilità dell’oblio per poterlo sfuggire. l’oblio non si fugge, si supera. humanist studies & the digital age domenico fiormonte 2.1 fall 2012 65 attraverso forme di rappresentazione che facciano vivere (e rivivere) il passato. perché se davvero il passato non è più in grado di parlarci, non possiamo dare la colpa al “balbettio dei [nuovi] media” o alla deperibilità dei supporti. perché non c’è colpa nel cambiamento. ma è tempo di concludere lì dove abbiamo iniziato. 4. epilogo. non c’è più tempo la notte dell’assassinio di fëdor pàvlovič karamazov, il figlio mitja, con le mani e il volto imbrattati di sangue, corre a casa di agrafena aleksàndrovna (grùšen’ka), dove, sgomento, riceve la notizia che l’amata è partita per la vicina cittadina di mòkroe. in questi e nei successivi minuti mitja matura la “decisione improvvisa” che lo porterà a costruire, con le sue stesse mani, il castello di accuse che ne sancirà la condanna. mitja karamazov, in preda alla più grande eccitazione, decide di spendere in baldoria il resto dei tremila rubli ottenuti con l’inganno da katerina ivànovna. si reca dunque alla bottega di plòtnikov e qui ordina champagne e ogni sorta di ben di dio, dopodiché, affittate due carrozze, una per lui e una per i viveri, corre il più veloce possibile a mòkroe. ma mentre nella locanda del paese si fa festa e mitja riconquista grùšen’ka, in città si sparge la voce dell’assassinio di fëdor pàvlovič. in poco tempo viene organizzata una spedizione per raggiungere e interrogare mitja, principale sospettato. a mòkroe giungono fra gli altri il giudice istruttore nikolàj parfènovič, l’ispravnik michaìl makaryč e il sostituto procuratore ippolìt kirìllovič. dostoevskij divide il serrato interrogatorio in cinque capitoli: tribolazione i, ii e iii, il procuratore prende in trappola mitja, il grande segreto di mitja. le beffe. ed è quest’ultimo quello che ci interessa. giunti a quel punto dell’interrogatorio tutti i presenti sono convinti della colpevolezza di mitja, ma egli crede di giocare il tutto per tutto raccontando ciò che ritiene il suo segreto più grave, ovvero la complessa dinamica del “furto” dei tremila rubli ai danni di katerina ivànovna. dopo aver raccontato come aveva ottenuto il denaro, mitja spiega che nonostante ciò che affermano molti testimoni egli non aveva speso tutti i tremila rubli, ma ne aveva conservati millecinquecento. enumera dunque una serie di casi in cui la colpa, a suo parere, ne sarebbe risultata attenuata: per esempio nel caso avesse restituito subito metà dei soldi o se al contrario li avesse sperperati tutti immediatamente. entrambe queste eventualità appaiono agli occhi di mitja meno gravi di aver conservato i soldi. tale atto gli sembra insopportabile perché denota da parte sua un calcolo, oltre che il protrarsi della sua impotenza: “è un mese intero che non riesco a decidermi, ecco! ebbene, è una bella cosa secondo voi, è una bella cosa?” tuttavia i giudici di fronte a queste spiegazioni rimangono freddi (“ma lasciamo da parte… queste sottigliezze”): al procuratore interessa piuttosto l’uso che il sospettato avrebbe fatto di quei millecinquecento rubli. ed ecco allora mitja prorompere con la sua teoria: ah, sì, infatti! – gridò mitja, battendosi la fronte. – perdonatemi, io vi faccio perdere tempo e disperare e intanto non vi spiego la cosa più importante, se no avreste capito subito, perché l’infamia è appunto nello scopo che avevo! vedete: il vecchio, il defunto, continua a insidiare agrafena aleksàndrovna, e io ero geloso, allora credevo che lei fosse incerta fra lui e me. … allora tirai via, a malizia, metà dei tremila rubli e li cucii dentro un pezzetto di stoffa, li cucii a sangue freddo, per humanist studies & the digital age domenico fiormonte 2.1 fall 2012 66 calcolo, li cucii prima di ubriacarmi, e poi, quando li avevo già cuciti, con l’altra metà andai a fare baldoria! no, è una bassezza! avete capito ora? … per tutto il tempo che ho portato addosso quei millecinquecento rubli, cuciti e attaccati al collo, tutti i giorni, a tutte le ore io mi dicevo: “sei un ladro, sei un ladro!” il procuratore scoppiò in una gran risata… (dostoevskij 986-987). il cuore della toccante quanto inutile contro-requisitoria di mitja è costituito da questa confessione. il discorso auto-accusatorio ruota intorno a alla relazione fra scopo del crimine e tempo (i giorni, le ore) lungo il quale il danno, per così dire, si estende. egli è colpevole perché ha rubato, ma lo è di più perché ha continuato a rubare: non fu solo l’atto di rubare a costituire il danno, ma i mesi passati senza reagire. lo scorrere della vita è colpa. in altre parole dmitrij karamazov enuncia il principio che l’etica è funzione del tempo. più il tempo si dilata, più si restringe lo spazio dell’etica. scontata la reazione negativa dall’autorità giudiziaria, che ribatte infastidita e addirittura si fa beffe delle preoccupazioni di mitja. è qui che dostoevskij offre una geniale rappresentazione di ciò che avviene quando la legge è chiamata a interpretare e applicare la norma in base alla realtà vissuta. l’incomprensione dei gestori del “tempo fisso” della legge si riflette e si lega all’accanita ricerca di una verità che può scaturire solo da un’analisi dei fatti e da una valutazione delle prove; per l’autorità giudiziaria è irrilevante per quanto i rubli siano stati attaccati al collo del sospettato. tali fatti e prove però sono “staccati” dal tempo perché la legge, applicandosi a tutti casi concreti, non può che astrarre da essi e dunque esistere fuori dal tempo. ciò che la legge non può comprendere, e anzi rifiuta o censura, non è semplicemente l’ossessione bislacca di un probabile criminale, ma la dinamicità dei processi temporali. il tempo è in grado di generare l’etica, ma la legge può condannare solo il fatto ingabbiato nel tempo statico del suo giudizio trascendentale, fissato una volta per tutte nel testo. l’armatura testo-tempo-verità emerge dunque nella sua rilucente potenza: la metafisica del testo, incarnata nella filologia – come dice segre, “il testo non ha una natura materiale” (segre, avviamento, 378) – opera una semplice sostituzione: dalla verità teologica a quella filologica. non si tratta dunque di nemici ma di alleati: entrambe lavorano per la ricerca della verità e la filologia, come il fratello diritto, si nutre di prove e indizi. tale verità però è già data nel momento in cui si postula che da qualche parte, al di fuori del tempo vissuto, essa esista e sia indirettamente o direttamente attingibile. nello stesso gelido empireo del tempo chiuso stanno assise la verità e il suo prodotto, il testo. le scienze umanistiche sono state, finora, le principali alleate di questa visione – secondo canfora, “solo dopo aver ricostruito il testo si dovrebbe approdare (eventualmente) a scoprire quale verità esso contenga” (canfora 11) – come se l’operazione di ricostruzione fosse del tutto asettica. spero che ormai sia chiaro lo scopo di questa conclusione: ricordare come i conflitti che sorgono nella produzione, uso e gestione dei contenuti digitali non siano esclusivamente di natura economica o sociale. dietro l’incomprensione o la difficoltà ad affrontare i problemi scatenati dalla digitalizzazione del testo vi è una colossale rimozione del tempo vivo della comunicazione. 11 bachtin parla della “interrelazione dinamica” e della “lotta” fra i due humanist studies & the digital age domenico fiormonte 2.1 fall 2012 67 momenti che determinano “il testo come enunciazione: il suo progetto (intenzione) e l’attuazione di questo progetto”. il rapporto con il senso di qualsiasi comunicazione per bachtin è sempre dialogico: la stessa comprensione è già dialogica… l’evento della vita del testo, cioè la sua autentica essenza, si svolge sempre sul confine tra due coscienze, tra due soggetti. … è un incontro di due testi: di quello pronto e di quello che si crea in reazione al primo, quindi un incontro di due soggetti, di due autori. il testo non è una cosa. (bachtin 295; corsivo mio) un nuovo tempus digitale scaturisce da un duplice processo di scrittura-lettura identitaria della rete: l’interazione e dialogo con e fra le macchine (sordi). ma la digitalizzazione fino ad oggi è stata prevalentemente interpretata come controllo, recupero e gestione del dato: e il dato, come mitja, può essere solo processato. ai giudici-teologi della digitalizzazione, interessa l’uso. trovare, gestire, controllare. e condannare. di qui un’interpretazione prevalentemente chiusa del testo, trattato appunto come cosa, com’è negli archivi, nelle biblioteche e nei relativi motori di ricerca. l’alleanza fra mondo teofilologico e logica del computer (il processore come “agente onniscente isolato”) è stata sin qui salda. ma nell’immersività simbiotica di esperimenti come il citato screen, come nell’uso quotidiano dei social media, il testo sfugge, “si evolve cooperativamente,” così come ci insegna l’etnografia (tyler), e noi scriviamo e leggiamo insieme alle macchine, lasciando tracce che vengono surrogate da altri, manipolando e rifondendo contenuti (ma gli altri chi o cosa?). l’autorialità collettiva, la co-autorialità delle macchine, non sono più solo una simulazione. e la risata del procuratore parfènovič, benché ancora riecheggi sinistra nei corridoi dove si decidono i destini e i contorni delle nostre identità, è destinata a spegnersi “nell’assordante sovrapposizione di voci e parole” della rete. 1 vi sono alcune persone che hanno visto nascere questo scritto e senza le quali non avrei mai avuto il coraggio di dargli forma. le ringrazio tutte, ma un pensiero particolare va a b.r. infine, mi sia permesso ricordare il maestro vedanta ramesh balsekar, scomparso a bombay il 29 settembre 2009 all’età di 92 anni. tuja namo (mi inchino a te). una versione precedente del contributo è apparsa in fiormonte, “tiempo texto verdad.” 2 il contesto storico del passo biblico è la divisione in satrapie a opera di dario i di persia nel 521 a.c. 3 la precettistica segriana (il suo sembra un manuale per novizi: “guai a guastare la purezza” ecc.) è il risultato pratico del processo sociale e storico che vede la stabilizzazione del testo come base per la moderna religione del prodotto. non è un caso che nel più ambizioso e influente progetto educativo occidentale mai concepito (e in parte realizzato), quello di wilhelm von humboldt, la filologia avrebbe sostituito la teologia (vega 265-266). 4 si veda il filone della semiotica retorico-ermeneutica, incarnato da françois rastier, il quale critica la “concezione metafisica” del testo della linguistica: “al di là della complessità che caratterizza la testualità in quanto tale, infatti, i testi utilizzano non soltanto lingue, generi e stili ma anche sistemi grafici e tipografici…. la semiotica ha in genere trascurato tutti questi aspetti, al pari dei linguisti che si limitano allo studio della morfosintassi.” (rastier 110). humanist studies & the digital age domenico fiormonte 2.1 fall 2012 68 5 vedi la sezione dedicata a magrelli su: <http://www.selc.ed.ac.uk/italian/digitalvariants/> 6 “cosicché, attraverso l’ingenuità delle cronologie, si verrebbe fatalmente ricondotti verso un punto sempre più remoto, mai presente in nessuna storia; questo punto non sarebbe altro che il proprio vuoto; e a partire da esso tutti gli inizi non potrebbero essere altro che delle riprese o delle occultazioni …. non bisogna rimandare il discorso alla lontana presenza dell’origine; bisogna affrontarlo nel meccanismo della sua istanza” (foucault 34-35). 7 uno degli strumenti di visualizzazione disponibili sul sito è stato battezzato infatti floating variants. 8 si veda l’esperimento realizzato da paolo sordi, “io sono”, un sito che si alimenta esclusivamente dei contenuti generati dai social media usati dall’autore: http://iosono.infolet.it. 9 vedi anche l’antologia disponibile su <http://www.hermeneia.net/eng/espais/literatura.html>. 10 “così nasce la filosofia, creatura troppo composita e mediata per racchiudere in sé nuove possibilità di vita ascendente. le spegne la scrittura, essenziale a questa nascita. e l’emozionalità, a un tempo dialettica e retorica, che ancora vibra in platone, è destinata a disseccarsi in un breve volgere di tempo, a sedimentarsi nello spirito sistematico” (colli 116). 11 tale incomprensione si ricollega alla teoria standard della comunicazione, che descrivendo la comunicazione come un “passaggio,” scambia il “corpo morto” della comunicazione, l’oggetto, per il suo corpo vivente, “la conversazione” (ronchi 193-198). works cited antonelli, roberto. “spazio, tempo e testualità: l’ecdotica tra regioni e nazione.” testi e tradizioni. le prospettive della filologia. atti del seminario, alghero, june 7 2003. ed. paolo manichedda. cagliari: centro di studi filologici sardi, 2004, 17-32. print bakhtin, mijail mijaïlovich. l’autore e l’eroe: teoria letteraria e scienze umane. torino: einaudi, 1988. print barbaglia, silvio. “la rilevanza ermeneutica delle disposizioni canoniche dei testi nelle sacre scritture. metodo ed esemplificazioni.” il testo biblico in tensione fra fissità canonica e mobilità storica. atti dell’xi convegno di studi veterotestamentari (torreglia, september 6-8, 1999). ed. silvio barbaglia. bologna: edizioni dehoniane bologna / ricerche storico bibliche, 2001. 185-268. print. benozzo, francesco. “etnofilologia.” ecdotica 4 (2007): 208-230. print. bologna, corrado. “per una filologia degli scarti, dei dislivelli, delle fratture”. testi e tradizioni. le prospettive della filologia. ed. paolo manichedda. 49-79. print. canfora, luciano. filologia e libertà. la più eversiva delle discipline, l’indipendenza di pensiero e il diritto alla verità. milano: rizzoli, 2008. print. colli, giorgio. la nascita della filosofia. milano: adelphi, 1975. print. dostoevskij, fëdor. i fratelli karamazov. tutti i romanzi. trans. pina maiani, vol. ii. firenze: sansoni, 1988. print. http://www.selc.ed.ac.uk/italian/digitalvariants/ 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tra utopia del canone fisso e fluidità del testo storico.” ed. domenico fiormonte. canoni liquidi. variazione culturale e stabilità testuale dalla bibbia a internet. napoli: scriptaweb, 2011. print. reboul, olivier. introduzione alla retorica. bologna: il mulino, 1996. print. riva, massimo. il futuro della letteratura. l’opera letteraria nell’epoca della sua (ri)producibilità digitale. napoli: scriptaweb, 2011. print. ronchi, rocco. filosofia della comunicazione. torino: bollati boringhieri, 2008. print. segre, cesare. avviamento all’analisi del testo letterario. torino: einaudi, 1985. print. humanist studies & the digital age domenico fiormonte 2.1 fall 2012 70 ---. ritorno alla critica. torino: einaudi, 2001. print. shillingsburg, peter. from gutenberg to google. electronic representations of literary texts. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2006. print. sordi, paolo. “noi (u)siamo la macchina. dal web design all’etnografia digitale.” lezione al corso di laurea magistrale “forme e generi della testualità digitale”, università roma tre, 26 maggio 2009. <http://www.slideshare.net/psordi/noi-usiamo-la-macchina>. web. storey, h. wayne. “all’interno della poetica grafico-visiva di petrarca.” rerum vulgarium fragmenta. cod. vat. lat. 3195. commentario all’edizione in fac-simile. eds. gino belloni, furio brugnolo, h. wayne storey, stefano zamponi. roma-padova: editrice antenore, 2004. 131-171. print. tyler, stephen a. “post-modern ethnography: from document of the occult to occult document.” writing cultures: poetics and politics of ethnography. eds. james clifford, george m. marcus. berkeley: university of california press, 1986. 122-140. print. vega, maría josé. “el laboratório filológico”. review of pascale hummel. histoire de l’histoire de la philologie. étude d’un genre épistémologique et bibliographique, gèneve, droz, 2000. ecdotica 1 (2004): 255-266. print. wardrip-fruin, noah. “screen.” leonardo 39, 2 (2006): 103-132. print. woodmansee, martha. the author, art, and the market. rereading the history of aesthetics. new york: columbia university press, 1994. print. ../appdata/local/temp/%3chttp:/www.slideshare.net/psordi/noi-usiamo-la-macchina%3e. baroque flair: seventeenth-century european sapphic poetry humanist studies & the digital age, 1.1 (2011) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.1.1.1176 151 baroque flair: seventeenth-century european sapphic poetry amanda powell, university of oregon abstract: early modern women poets across europe and at least one colony enlisted petrarchist terms, often with a self-aware, parodic twist. some examples, considered here, include (first) self-portrait poems that serve to critique not only the lyric speaker/portrait subject’s imperfect face or physique, but the very phenomenon of petrarchist lyric objectifications of female love objects, and (second) love poems addressed by women to other women. by applying a theoretical grounding that combines feminist, lesbian, and queering approaches, we can bring to these poems a reading that is alert to moments when they reproduce, rework, or contest the kinds of gendered discourse and heteronormative paradigms that we find in better-known maleauthored poems. the essay concludes with a survey of the kinds of cultural work performed by these texts in their ideological, religious, political, and poetic contexts. as cultural premises changed, the poems moved from widespread presence into illegibility or erasure from literary historiography. for over three centuries, literary history erased, forgot, or became unable to account for the once-prestigious poetic phenomenon of women’s engaged reshapings of petrarchism. women poets took up the terms, concerns, and conventions of the dominant lyric language for profane love but with a difference that marks their awareness of and engagement with gender hierarchies. this essay briefly introduces two types of texts by women who demonstrated their poetic mastery while often, it would appear, having fun with convention: satirical self-portraiture and love poetry by women to women. in the early modern period, across europe and in at least one colony, women’s love poems to women appeared in print and manuscript circulation in italian, spanish, portuguese, english, french, flemish, and dutch. the 1611 tesoro de la lengua castellana o española by sebastián de covarrubias gives as one sense of humano (alternately, for modern english, human or humane): “humanarse: humillarse y reconocerse, ser cortés con todos y afable, aunque sea gran señor” (“to become human: to humble oneself and know oneself well”) (704).1 reconocerse suggests knowing one’s own limits and acknowledging what is due to others. humanarse appears in modern dictionaries as both to “become more human” and, especially as preserved in latin american spanish, with a sense of “condescend” (see for instance simon & schuster’s international dictionary). what does “human” mean for “humanism” and the “humanities,” when we consider one two-century slice of the past and its lyric expressions of gender and sexuality? in the early modern period, as now, we can perceive the force of cultural efforts to put “woman” back into “human,” observing how easily this works for some thinkers and http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ humanist studies & the digital age amanda powell 1.1 winter 2011 152 how uneasy or condescending it makes others. a “reconocimiento”—an epistemological acknowledgment—of same-sex desire and fulfillment informs the classics but was avoided or misrepresented by some european humanists, while others recalled and drew on it. early modern women poets enlisted the classical past, along with other cultural spheres of prestige—including politically powerful queens and the parallel courts of noblewomen, the divinized virgin mary herself as “queen of heaven,” visually prevalent images of femmes fortes and viraginous women—to assert a rounded, vital, and even humorous humanity for themselves. early modern women poets frequently critique a self-serving male self-regard inherent in the petrarchist paradigm. as frederick goldin remarks, “a poet’s idealized lady can function psychologically as a narcissistic idol, a reflection of himself” (103). as scholars today (re-) locate and (re-) publish early modern women’s lyric, a woman-authored anti-petrarchism that satirized such male self-regard comes into view. women poets enlist, but also call into question, petrarchist paradigms and vocabularies. to date, scholars largely ignore or dismiss the great number of poems in which they do this—whether because they are unfamiliar with these female-authored texts or because they lack critical paradigms adequate to the task of assessing them. women poets tend to deploy petrarchist discourse in ways that openly or tacitly critique both the conventional narcissistic self-regard noted by goldin and the corresponding fragmentation and objectification of the beloved famously commented on by nancy vickers (“diana described”).2 they frequently take up familiar and culturally prized elements of petrarchism, such as the blazon, to make loving address to other women. often well-regarded and circulated in their own period, these texts for the most part remain unknown, overlooked, or squeamishly “explained away” to the present day.3 in currency of eros, ann rosalind jones notes women’s efforts to insert and (decorously) assert themselves in a dominantly masculinist lyric discourse of love. two salient, linked aspects lie beyond jones’s study of poetic strategies: one, the satirical spin that energizes women’s citing, use, and evocation of petrarchism; another, the range of friendly, loving, devoted, passionate, and/or erotic address that female poets make to women. why are the poetic texts in this category so little known? for one thing, they have not been collected, or recollected, in anthologies. masculinist and hetero-normative—or perhaps, more directly, homophobic—definitions of humanism have been produced from the early modern period to the present. as a brief introduction to a few poets and lyric texts that were once better known and now await further exploration, i present here a few cameo appearances and snapshots, as it were, from the european and colonial late-1500s and 1600s. in the present context, we might ask not just why or how these poems come into being, but why petrarchism? how can a tradition of suffering in “icy fires,” let alone of representing women’s fragmented physical parts to the exclusion of their subjectivity, serve women’s poetic aims? where do women access the discursive strategies that they employ? my conclusion below suggests ways to theorize and explore this prolific work that awaits our attention. humanist studies & the digital age amanda powell 1.1 winter 2011 153 satirical self-portraiture a zesty anti-petrarchist satire appears in a poetic self-portrait by catalina clara ramírez de guzmán (b. 1611d. after 1663).4 ramírez de guzmán, from a family of prominent catholic ecclesiastics and civic figures in provincial llerena, extremadura, spain, participated energetically in contests sponsored by poetry academies. her elegiac, topical, and satirical verse circulated in manuscript and in cancionero compilations. her poetry employs petrarchist commonplaces of lavish flattery and protestations of devotion, for example, in encomiastic missives addressed to her mother and sisters. a humorous selfportrait poem holds special appeal for investigators of female anti-petrarchism. appearing with the epigraph “retrato de la autora, habiéndosele pedido un galán suyo” (portrait of the author, because one of her suitors requested it), the text follows convention to represent female body parts—the speaker’s—fragment by fragment, using the coplas de pie quebrado (or “broken-foot” stanzas) alternating paired eightand four-syllable lines, abcabc. she employs an arte menor, popular-verse form (which is in fact complex, compositionally demanding, and enlisted for learned poetry as much as for informal satires). her use of this structure in itself signals a casual relationship to high-italianate tradition, demonstrating a relaxed, colloquial posture towards the enshrined conventions of petrarchism. the speaker apparently puzzles out, in the act of utterance and enumerating piece by petrarchist piece, the problem of how suitably to portray herself without misrepresenting her own attributes or failing in culturally imposed modesty. the “galán suyo,” an interested suitor, seems from the epigraph to have asked for a description prior to a first meeting or perhaps a memento of already successful encounters. the exchange of courtship portraits in minute as well as larger and more formal scale was common early modern practice. in other words, the poetic exchange suggests a premodern social-media format, a cancionero facebook or match.com posting. ramírez de guzmán’s humor not only inverts but jestingly outdoes the characteristic “power play” identified by ann rosalind jones as “involved in exposing a female beloved to the view of male connoisseurs in the descriptive enumeration of the blazon” (7). as the poem diminishes self as subject through word play, it wittily dismisses the genre of petrarchan portrait as the measure of the value of a woman: un retrato me has pedido, y aunque es alhaja costosa a mi recato, por lograrte agradecido, si he dicho que soy hermosa, me retrato. (lines 1-6) you’ve asked me for my portrait, a jewel a bit too dear for my pudeur; if i say that i’m no eyesore to satisfy you, then myself i here humanist studies & the digital age amanda powell 1.1 winter 2011 154 with draw. the topos of the admirer-voyeur who gazes on (that is, reads) a petrarchist portrait-poem draws on already heavily overdetermined convention. this first stanza undoes the cliché in a few strokes. in effect, “that i am beautiful is all you want to know, and about all one ever does know of the ‘lady’ anyway. my beauty must be stated, being in parts and sum the chief constituent element of the conventional portrait you request; therefore, the statement is the portrait. but the obligation to declare attractiveness undermines another requisite: my ‘feminine’ modesty, wherein lies my virtue.” punning underscores this send-up: ramírez’s verb “retratarme” signifies both “to portray myself” and also “to retract what i have said” (because in the period, no significant orthographic difference existed between “retratarme” and “retractarme”).5 the text undoes the idea of beauty precisely while producing the usual catalogue of traits. indeed it overrides admiration for physical beauty entirely, replacing looks with savvy. one hundred and thirty-eight lines catalogue ravishing attributes, such as her nose “right between the eyes” (line 54) and “passable” throat (line 73). directly alluding to garcilaso de la vega’s sonnet xxiii (“en tanto que de rosa y azucena / se muestra la color en vuestro gesto …”) and thus foregrounding a playful critique of petrarchist antecedents, the lyric voice observes: si es de azucena o de rosa mi frente, no comprendo ni el color; y será dificultosa de imitar, pues no le entiendo yo la flor. (lines 25-30) if my forehead’s more of a lily or a rose is hard to say; and i don’t know that i can render flowers i don’t really under stand, anyway. this poem resonates with the blasón tradition as it emulates yet humorously overturns the overdetermined portrait-poem on female beauty. implicitly critiquing petrarchist commonplaces and conventional views, her text showcases lively wit and accomplished mastery of poetic discourse. ramírez de guzmán’s playful self-mockery, as it parodies a tiresomely oppressive discourse, invites comparison to a similar spoof in the ovillejo by sor juana inés de la cruz (a discussion of this spirited anti-petrarchist satire concludes bergmann and middlebrook’s “hollines y peces”). humanist studies & the digital age amanda powell 1.1 winter 2011 155 sapphic satire among the ways that early modern women poets work variations on petrarchist conventions, their widespread address of love poems to other women is especially arresting, given the ongoing preoccupations with gender and sexuality of our present cultural period. passionate poems foregrounding the female gender of both speaker and addressee circulated in print and manuscript, with spanish, colonial new spanish, english, portuguese, italian, french, flemish, and dutch examples. this lyric discourse pointedly satirizes longstanding convention, posing a humorous, loving mutual regard quite different from petrarchist objectification of the beloved (dugaw and powell, “sapphic self-fashioning”). such poems also invoke longstanding female prestige inhering politically in courtly spheres and philosophically in neoplatonic textual and visual references (dugaw and powell, “feminist road not taken”). poems by women who address other women in passionately erotic terms constituted a fashion in the court-oriented lyric of europe in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.6 petrarchan tradition offered poets familiar topoi—from the warm, enraptured gaze to the cold thud of disappointment—to be reworked and reimagined. this framework allowed women poets to articulate a woman-to-woman eroticism that functioned in what our era can view as a paradoxical combination of conservative and liberatory ways. the petrarchist stance-with-a-difference allowed a voicing of female homosociality and homoeroticism in the context of aristocratic court circles and of the intellectually privileged bourgeoisie that invoked courtly cultural forms. across baroque cultures, women’s love poetry to women satirizes the silencing of women while it opens a space for female homoerotic passion and sexuality.7 when scholars heed these texts at all, most declare them professions of friendship on a renaissance model of amicitia, an observation neatly combining accuracy with squeamishness. many of the poems do express affection, tenderness, and other bonds that characterize close friendship, and in some cases biographical evidence attests to a friendly association between writer and “real-life” addressee; some combine a loving address with flattery and solicitations of patronage. however, many poems of this type pointedly engage petrarchist terms for the fleeting contentment and durable privations of erotic love, ardently moving beyond “standard” (if masculine poetic practice constitutes a standard) early modern forms of friendship-address. to insist dualistically that such poems “really” express either the affectionate bonds between “good friends” or “that era’s form of lesbianism”—or, for that matter, the care and feeding of a patron by a favored subject—is to miss their most interesting features. in any of these cases, why and especially how do poets take up the use of erotic language that was in their day, as it is now, long familiar from more “mainstream” traditions of male-authored love poems to women? what made these women-authored poems—frequently celebrated, circulated, and esteemed in their own day—become all but unreadable to moderns? humanist studies & the digital age amanda powell 1.1 winter 2011 156 these poems often flaunt their enlistment of the conventional language of erotic love, by drawing the reader’s attention to a woman speaking to a woman as male lyric-speakers have done. it is interesting, but (alas) fruitless, to speculate on whether the woman author of a given love poem to a female addressee felt erotic longings for, or sought to consummate an extra-textual close encounter with, the woman poetically invoked. just as fruitless as, say, attempting to detail how the historical petrarch might respond were an eager, flesh-andblood laura to appear in his boudoir; or whether anything—and if so what—transpired between the sheets of garcilaso de la vega and isabel freire, if actual sheets they ever crept between, beyond those of manuscript and printed folios. while critics seem to demand (impossible) extra-textual substantiating evidence before conceding the possibility of woman-for-woman’s lyric infatuation, they do not require this “higher evidentiary standard” (in historian martha vicinus’s term, 59) from lyrics of presumptively heterosexual address. from the context of colonial new spain, or mexico, the extensive epistolary-verse offerings of sor juana inés de la cruz (1648-1695) to her beloved friend and patron, the countess of paredes, vicereine maría luisa manrique pose examples par excellence. in some poems, sor juana’s speaker invokes a long continuation of the medieval courtly love vein in which the lady was saluted with the masculine form “mi dons” (that is, “my lord”; sautman and sheingorn 30-31). the beloved “lysi” (the vicereine) is variously called “adorado dueño mío” (my adored lord; juana inés de la cruz 93, line 29) or again “divino” and “hermoso dueño” (divine / lovely lord; 212, lines 25, 30). this corpus of poems springs from a context of known friendship. however, the texts playfully, passionately, or strenuously incite the reader to consider both the potency and the possible impropriety of a woman’s erotic lyric address to another woman, as in the poetically virtuosic romance decasílabo (ballad in irregular meter) that in working through terms of the blazon, praises the vicereine’s throat as a passageway to her breasts: tránsito a los jardines de venus, órgano es de marfil, en canora música, tu garganta, que en dulces éxstasis aun al viento aprisiona. (juana inés de la cruz 204-5, lines 37-40) transiting to the sumptuous gardens of venus, musical organ of marble, your sculpted throat captivates even the air, in bewitching ecstasies of a melody long and low. this poem and others clearly flaunt their reach beyond friendship to the erotic (powell, “sor juana’s love poems addressed to women”). anne de rohan-soubise (1584-1646), from a powerful ducal family in brittany and anjou, allied herself with dissenting calvinists. her extensive learning in latin and hebrew received admiring comment, while her manifest piety within a severe protestant framework coexisted with an active poetic practice as précieuse and hostess to a bon-vivant salon in paris. her poetry, circulated and preserved in manuscript in keeping with salonnière humanist studies & the digital age amanda powell 1.1 winter 2011 157 practices (poésies, published in 1862; see also stanton, “anne de rohan”), dashingly combines elegies to family and political figures (such as her “stances sur la mort de henry iv”) with passionate address to beautiful women. a quatrain to the viscountess “d’oulchy [d’auchy]”—a distinguished bel esprit of the time (poésies 75, n. 17)—enthuses in conventional petrarchist style on eyes that are better termed “skies” in their celestial blue, yet “suns” in their capacity to set fire and wound: ce ne sont pas des yeux, ce sont plutost des cieux, aussy bien que les cieux ils ont la couleur bleue; non, ce sont des soleils, car ils blessent le veue, de ceux qui de les voir sont trop curieux. (69) these cannot be eyes, these are rather heavens, for like skies above, their shade is deepest blue; no, they must be suns that blaze to burn the gaze of those who seek such loveliness to view. another poem counsels a certain isabelle of “beauté féconde” (“fertile beauty”) that speaker and beloved must be content with friendship (43). despite mutual desires for further “amorous embraces” (“amoureuse braise”), heterosexual marriage is likely to make a supplanting claim on their hearts: … il faut donc, chère isabelle, d’une amitié mutuelle contenter icy nos vœux; que l’amoureuse braise, qui vit dedans nous s’appaise … offrant chacun le cœur sien dessus l’autel de l’hymenée, nos amitiés recompensées par un conjugal lien. (lines 4-8, 10-13; 43) well then, my dearest isabelle, with a friendship warm and mutual we must appease our wishes; let the loving ember living in us both now slumber … each one offering up her heart at hymen’s holy altar, loves exchanged, perhaps rewarded for a marriage bond. the lyric distinguishes between the proposed, redefined friendship (“amitié mutuelle”) with which speaker and addressee must be contented and the erotic embraces they formerly enjoyed. humanist studies & the digital age amanda powell 1.1 winter 2011 158 a poem to madeleine, who is called a “belle de qui dépend ma vie” (“beautiful lady on whom my life depends”), protests the beloved’s rejection and emphasizes the speaker’s ennoblement through suffering, both in highly conventional terms-with-a-gender twist: non, je ne me plains, madame, de voir vostre fière rigueur, car le beau sujet qui m’enflamme ne me fait mourir qu’en douceur; je tiens à honneur ceste peine puisque c’est pour vous, madeleine. (poesies 48-49, lines 1-6) my lady, i shall not complain of your cruel severity, for the lovely one who sets me aflame does not slay me, save in sweetness; i am honored by this pain of mine because it is for you, madeleine. (italics in original) these lyrics give no opportunity for inquiry (sadly undocumentable, although interesting) into what may have taken place between the speaker and isabelle, or madeleine, or other real or fictive beloveds, involving bodies or gifts or affections. rather, we can make forthright examination of how women poets enlist the same poetic strategies deployed by male petrarchists, to image-out the hope for, bliss during, or loss of amorous “conquest,” “possession,” or enjoyment. anne de rohan’s poems on the surface adopt numerous elements of petrarchism and courtly love. but for the reader cognizant of the female gender of author and addressee, they incisively reinscribe those conventions. the poet’s elegant handling of prized cultural forms, first, demonstrates a female author’s capacity for poetic mastery: “car le beau sujet qui m’enflamme / ne me fait mourir qu’en douceur” (“for the lovely one who sets me aflame / does not slay me, save in sweetness”). subjectivity exquisitely refined by love—suffering is not an exclusively masculine domain. second, as jones points out, a woman poet’s “adulatory imitation” of a privileged discourse destabilizes “the gender system that prohibits her claim to public language—although with limited disturbance to that system” (4). these poems held further strong resonance for their period, as i suggest in my general conclusion below. given limited space and time, i make abbreviated mention of a few more examples. the portuguese violante do ceu (or in castilian, del cielo) adopts petrarchism, like the mexican juana inés de la cruz, to make witty reformulations that not only emulate but send up those conventions. from a convent in lisbon, in the same period—indeed, in a life extending for almost the entire seventeenth century (1601-1693[?])—she collected and published her combined secular and devotional poetry. the rimas, composed in portuguese and castilian and issued in nantes, france (1646), features poems addressed to women in various discourses of passionate love, wryly amused friendship, and the intense jealousy wellhumanist studies & the digital age amanda powell 1.1 winter 2011 159 known from male and presumptively heterosexual (if homosocial) poets. many of these texts evoke eroticism and seduction and then seem to enjoin—indeed enjoy—the reader’s likely discomfiture. for a sampling and analysis of this aspect of her verse, see my “‘oh qué diversas estamos’” (73-80); a varying critical treatment appears in adrienne martín, “rhetoric.” in italy, tarquinia molza (1542-1617) received wide admiration (and in 1600, honorary roman citizenship) as “l’unica” for her intellectual, literary, and musical achievement. she served as choral director and poet at the famously magnificent house of the duke alfonso ii d’este (jaffe 311).8 there, one scholar observes, molza maintained openly “passionate relations with women friends, to whom her most emotional poetry is addressed,” whereas among her lyrics of love none can be identified as addressed to a masculine beloved (riley 99 n. 10).9 irma jaffe renders a section of one love poem thus: “i sobbed / with passion you aroused... / for the lover is tossed between / fire and waves” (320). francesco patrizi’s l’amorosa filosofia (1577), in the edition and translation by john charles nelson, remarks of molza, “no other woman has ever enflamed so many hearts ...—in sum, [she is loved by] every manner of man, and no few women” (riley 100, n 15). isabella canali andreini (1562-1604), an internationally renowned actor, wrote acclaimed letters, plays, and poetry including the mirtilla (1588), her rime (1601), and the lettere (1607 and various editions). giovanna rabitti observes that andreini’s written texts, like her stage performances, speak both as and to women and men in flexible ways that “challenge the rigid boundaries of gender representation” (47-48), as in her “madrigale iiii”: se non temprate un poco madonna il mio gran foco con quel gielo, che’n voi nascose il cielo, o se picciola dramma non riceuete in voi de la mia immensa fiamma temo, che morte haurà di noi la palma, di voi per troppo ghiaccio, e di mi poi perche foco souerchio hò dentro à l’alma. (rime 9) if, my lady, you do not somewhat check my raging fire with that icy chill that heaven concealed within you, or if you will not take in the tiniest dram of my towering flame, i fear that death will triumph over both— over you for too much freezing, and then me because of the excessive fire within my soul. 10 humanist studies & the digital age amanda powell 1.1 winter 2011 160 in andreini’s trademark dramatic voicing, our old friends fire and ice evoke the lover’s passion and frustration. the english poets katherine phillips and aphra behn in england have received attention for their love poems to women, although most criticism does not treat their texts in the international context of european baroque women’s poetry that substantially informs this aspect of their work as representative rather than exceptional. phillips, renowned as “the matchless orinda,” and behn, who saw her theater works much produced in london and who published extensive lyric poems, were both celebrated in the period for deft, and sometimes buoyantly parodic, love poems to women (dugaw and powell, “sapphic selffashioning” 135-41). finally, flemish and dutch poets deserving recognition on their own and also as representative of this international, early modern vein of love poetry to women include katharina questiers (1631-69), cornelia van der veer (1639-1702?), katharina lescailje (1649-1711), and titia brongersma (late seventeenth century). maaike maijer and lia van gemert collect and discuss examples of their poetry that reveal characteristics of this international petrarchist-sapphic mode. theorizing these voices and these loves once the texts that identify sixteenthand seventeenth-century women’s international flair for satirical and sapphic reworkings of petrarchism stand before us, we can enlist feminist, queer, historicizing, and discursive theories to open to view the poems and the cultural work they perform. first, numerous textual passages either suggest or highlight an awareness of participating in hierarchically gendered discourse traditions. far from being anachronistic, feminist approaches are necessary to analyze the poems’ shaping of lyric discourse and the poets’ commanding of opportunities to make their work known. while it seems counter-intuitive to most modern viewpoints, many aspects of the baroque period vitally empowered women’s intellectual and cultural activity, including the production of these poems. queer theory provides useful perspectives for investigating how this was so, by offering ways to search against and through our own pervasive cultural assumptions about sexualities and their representations. richly resonant emblemata of that period, grounded ideologically in christian neoplatonist philosophy and politically in the then-ongoing presence of women rulers and nobles, provided sources for creative and intellectual women through artifacts, spaces, and energies—but tend to be markedly misread, or simply erased, in modernity. these include visual images, literary exempla, religious processions and ceremonies, and real-world examples of unabashed, agencywielding women ranging from the divine mother of god, to political power-brokering queens, various femmes fortes of legendary and commonplace description, female patrons of the arts and letters, and cross-dressing, far-roving women fighters (in the streets and on the stage). humanist studies & the digital age amanda powell 1.1 winter 2011 161 to place women’s complex use of poetic convention in accurate context, we should account for how petrarchist lyric discourse reaches them within a kind of “popular culture of the elite” within which they shape their opportunities. they are not necessarily reading specific poems in the canon by francesco petrarca himself—although that does occur for some women. these are more often readings-of-readings; so that (for example) in spain and portugal, the alluded examples include garcilaso, herrera, and company, as read and rewritten by góngora, lope, quevedo, et al. thus, by the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a mere note or two serves to summon recognizable melodies, harmonics, and overtones. female and male poets give evidence of a rich mix of frustration as well as delight with an aging trove of imagery and poetic strategy. they enlist and renovate metaphors—jeweled, flowery, stony, architectural, and cosmic—along with clichéd antitheses and paradoxes that resonate with neoplatonic and erotic significance. women writers show equal familiarity, when compared to both much-studied as well as lesserknown male poets, with how the too-familiar ingredients can be served up afresh to “fashion a self” or articulate subjectivity (at the risk of enlisting our present-day clichétrove). taken as a group, petrarchist satire and sapphic love poems provide women poets with an equalizing discourse. most basically, the authors display poetic prowess in the culturally prestigious lyric form. discursively, this reworked petrarchism confers dignity—with a wit all the more supple when it is humorously enacted—between intellectually and affectively equal subjects, the speaker and her female addressee. such poems offer a valuable—and judging by their prevalence in the period, clearly valued—model of interaction that provides a variant for the gender hierarchy of petrarchism. time and again, the gender-bending address of women’s love poems to women does honor to the perfections of the beloved lady. as seen above, anne de rohan addresses her madeleine as a “madame” who rules over the speaker’s heart with “fière rigueur” (“cruel severity”). by speaking in female voice to address women, women poets expose gender convention as a regulated system that conceals possible alternatives. male-authored petrarchist love-suffering usually roots in relational opposition to, rather than pleasurable collaboration or interdependence with, the addressee. when women poets evoke this paradigm, the fact of female authorship and female-to-female address generates an ironic distance from tradition. humorous or over-the-top deployment of petrarchist imagery sets up a basis for recognition of the self in and with the “other,” similarly female beloved, rather than over/against her (see powell, “sor juana’s love poems” 209, 213). in the early modern context, this deployment of petrarchist homage works to reinforce women’s real-world lines of interchange of power and support. a now-deepening investigation of epistolary correspondences demonstrates vital practices among women ranging from queens to noblewomen to bourgeoisies for creating, nurturing, and maintaining political and financial as well as affective alliances.11 the widespread sapphic love poetry in the period in part reflects the cultural importance of social network relations between women, to reveal another source of energy infusing these poems of love. humanist studies & the digital age amanda powell 1.1 winter 2011 162 finally, in many texts the lavish erotic imagery makes clear that, as love poems, they are just that and work familiar chords along with changes on petrarchist harmonies to express friendly, fond, and amorous devotions of various sorts. for example, sor juana’s humor overturns poetic and social conventions to undo not only the paradigms that objectify, silence, and separate women but what our age terms the heteronormative groundings of these paradigms as well. infused with all this charge (to shift metaphors), it is no wonder the poetry produced a kick. 1 unless otherwise noted, the translations here are mine. i must reconocer with grateful acknowledgement dianne dugaw’s contributions to this essay, through our ongoing collaborative research on and thinking about these poems. 2 bergmann and middlebrook read the dismembered “petrarchan woman” in early modern spanish literature; they treat sor juana’s resistance to the “problematic representation of woman’s desire and woman’s body,” especially in her satiric portrait-poem, romance no. 43, “sobre si es atrevimiento” addressed to elvira, countess of galve (153-54). 3 see powell, “‘¡oh qué diversas estamos,/ dulce prenda, vos y yo!’” (especially 55-57) for an analysis of how seventeenth-century spanish women’s love poems to women construct four explicit, grammatically marked modes of address: (1) explicitly female speaker to male addressee; (2) male speaker to female addressee; (3) female, or unspecified, to unidentified addressee; and (4) female speaker to explicitly female addressee. each of these stances in individual poems, and the effects created collectively across a poet’s single interventions and manuscript or published collections, can work theatrically to deliver charged perspectives on presumably normative roles. these modes create space to elicit love’s everpresent undercurrent, the consolidation or exchange of power. 4 see my further discussion subtitled “catalina clara ramírez de guzmán: humor, silence, violence” in “‘¡oh qué diversas estamos….’” (68-73). the poet’s work is now available in a new critical edition: catalina clara ramírez de guzmán. obra poética. ed. aránzazu borrachero mendíbil and karl mclaughlin. mérida, spain: editora regional de extremadura, 2010. 5 julián olivares and elizabeth boyce note this pun (tras el espejo 186, n. 6). 6 scholars who have observed this fashion in and (to some degree) across european literatures include harriet andreadis in sappho in early modern england: female samesex literary erotics, 1550-1714 (chicago: university of chicago press, 2001); emma donoghue in passions between women: british lesbian culture 1668-1801 (ny: harper collins, 1993); susan lanser in “befriending the body: female intimacies as class acts,” eighteenth-century studies, 32 (1998-99): 179-98 and in “‘au sein de vos pareilles’: sapphic separatism in late eighteenth-century france,” journal of homosexuality, 41 (2001): 10516; adrienne martín in “the rhetoric of female friendship in the lyric of sor violante del cielo,” calíope, 3 (1997): 57-71 and in “the mediation of lesbian eros in golden age verse” in alain saint-saens and maría josé delgado, lesbianism and homosexuality in early modern spain: literature and theater in context (new orleans: university press of humanist studies & the digital age amanda powell 1.1 winter 2011 163 the south, 2000), 343-62; and elizabeth wahl in invisible relations: representations of female intimacy in the age of enlightenment (stanford: stanford university press, 1999). 7 what do we talk about when we talk about non-normative discursive love? taking as a chief point of departure michel foucault’s history of sexuality, literary and historical scholarship of the last thirty-plus years wrestles with how to conceptualize same-sex eroticism before the formation of modern sexual identities. recent conceptualizations of erotic love between women in pre-modern texts include “same-sex love and desire between women” (canadé sautman and pamela sheingorn, “introduction” in sautman and sheingorn, eds., same-sex love and desire among women in the middle ages [ny: palgrave, 2001]. 1-47); the “silent sin” (alain saint-saens, “homoerotic suffering, pleasure and desire in early modern europe, 1450-1750” in alain saint-saens and maría josé delgado, eds., lesbianism and homosexuality in early modern spain: literature and theater in context [new orleans: university press of the south, 2000].1-86); “female homoeroticism” (bernadette brooten, love between women: early christian responses to female homoeroticism [chicago: university of chicago press, 1996]); “lesbian-like” (judith bennett, “‘lesbian-like’ and the social history of lesbians,” journal of the history of sexuality, 9 [2000]: 1-24); “queer desire” (valerie traub, “desire and the differences it makes” in valerie wayne, ed., the matter of difference: materialist feminist criticism of shakespeare [ithaca: cornell university press, 1991]. 81-114); “female intimacy” (elizabeth wahl, invisible relations); and “sapphism” (susan lanser, “befriending the body”). given my own literary interest, and that of the writers considered here, i follow lanser’s allusive term sapphic for texts that express or suggest erotic love between women. this is not to assert for these poems or poets a textual, or sexual, identity anachronistic to the early modern, or genealogical connection to the classical lyricist, but rather to supply collective terminology for the poems in question and, especially, to refuse the suffocating inconvenience of wordlessness. on this point see marie-jo bonnet, “sappho, or the importance of culture in the language of love: tribade, lesbienne, homosexuelle,” in queerly phrased: language, gender and sexuality, ed. anna livia and kira hall (new york: oxford university press, 1997).147-66. 8 this patronage center in ferrara shows the multi-media, courtly role for intellectual and creative women; isabella andreini starred there annually with her traveling theatre company, the gelosi. molza was leader of the concerto delle donne, a group of accomplished women musicians who performed private court concerts or musica secreta under the patronage of duke alfonso ii (jaffe 337, n. 20). 9 by way of gender-contrast, joanne marie riley notes that toward male addressees molza’s poetry evidences “warm, affectionate friendship”—but not the passionate or erotic investment found in poems to women (23, n. 16). 10 my thanks go to nathalie hester for her insightful reading of this poem, supplied in conversation. 11 on early modern spanish women’s use of epistolary networks to form, consolidate, and extend political power, see for example romero-díaz. humanist studies & the digital age amanda powell 1.1 winter 2011 164 works cited andreini, isabella. rime. milano: girolamo bordone e pietromartire locarni, 1601. print. bergmann, emilie, and leah middlebrook. “la mujer petrarquista:‘hollines y peces’: poética renacentista de la óptica de sor juana.” breve historia feminista de la literatura española (en lengua castellana), vol. 2: la mujer en la literatura española: modos de representación desde la edad media hasta el siglo xvii. ed. iris m. zavala. barcelona: editorial anthropos, 1995. 145-58. print. covarrubias, sebastián. tesoro de la lengua castellana o española. ed. martín de riquer. barcelona: alta fulla, 1987. print. dugaw, dianne, and amanda powell. “a feminist road not taken: baroque sapphic poetry.” reason and its others: italy, spain, and the new world. ed. david castillo and massimo lollini. nashville: vanderbilt up, 2006. 123-42. print. ---. “sapphic self-fashioning in the baroque era: women’s petrarchan parody in english and spanish.” studies in eighteenth-century culture 35 (2006): 127-60. print. goldin, frederick. the mirror of narcissus in courtly love lyric. ithaca: cornell u. press, 1967. jaffe, irma b., with gernando colombardo. shining eyes, cruel fortune: the lives and loves of italian renaissance women poets. new york: fordham up, 2002. print. jones, ann rosalind. the currency of eros. women' s love lyric in europe, 1540-1620. bloomington: indiana up, 1990. print. juana inés de la cruz. the answer / la respuesta. ed. and trans. electa arenal and amanda powell. new york: feminist press at the city university of new york, [1999] 2009. print. ---. obras completas. ed. alfonso méndez plancarte. vol. 1 lírica personal. mexico city: fondo de cultura ecónomica, [1951] 1994. print. maijer, maaike, ed. the defiant muse: dutch and flemish feminist poems from the middle ages to the present. new york: feminist press at the city university of new york, 1998. martín, adrienne. “the rhetoric of female friendship in the lyric of sor violante del cielo.” calíope 3.2 (1997): 57-71. print. romero-díaz, nieves. “autoridad y genealogías femeninas en torno a la infanta maría teresa de austria.” mujeres alborotadas: early modern and colonial women’s cultural production. ed. amanda powell and stacey schlau. spec. issue of letras femeninas 35 (2009): 311-37. olivares, julián, and elizabeth boyce. tras el espejo la musa escribe: lírica femenina de los siglos de oro. madrid: siglo veinteuno, 1993. print. humanist studies & the digital age amanda powell 1.1 winter 2011 165 patrizi, francesco. l’amorosa filosofia [1577]. ed. and trans. john charles nelson. florence: felice le monnier, 1963. print. powell, amanda. “‘¡oh qué diversas estamos, / dulce prenda, vos y yo!’: multiple voicings in love poems to women by marcia belisarda, catalina clara ramírez de guzmán, and sor violante del cielo.” en desagravio de las damas: studies on women’s poetry of the golden age. ed. julián olivares. london: tamesis, 2009. 51-80. print. ---. “sor juana’s love poems addressed to women.” approaches to teaching sor juana inés de la cruz. ed. emilie bergmann and stacey schlau. new york: modern language association, 2007. 209-19. print. rabitti, giovanna. “lyric poetry, 1500-1650.” trans. abigail brundin. a history of 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“hiding behind words? lesbianism in seventeenth-century dutch poetry.” thamyris 2 (1995): 11-44. print. vicinus, martha. “lesbian history: all theory and no facts or all facts and no theory?” radical history review 60 (1994). 57-75. print. vickers, nancy j. “the body re-membered: petrarchan lyric and the strategies of description” mimesis: from mirror to method, augustine to descartes. ed. john d lyons. aurora, colorado: davies group publishers, 2004. 95-104. print. ---. “diana described: scattered woman and scattered rhyme” critical inquiry 8.2 (1981): 265-79. print. baroque flair: seventeenth-century european sapphic poetry amanda powell, university of oregon satirical self-portraiture sapphic satire theorizing these voices and these loves works cited humanist studies & the digital age, 5.1 (2017) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.7264/n3t1522c digital humanities and italian studies: research outcomes crystal hall abstract this section presents new digital projects related to italian studies. some of the essays included in here were delivered at the modern language association 2017 roundtable on the state of digital humanities in italian studies, sponsored by the forum on 20thand 21stcentury italian. introduction this section grew from conversations at the modern language association 2017 roundtable on the state of digital humanities in italian studies, sponsored by the forum on 20thand 21stcentury italian. while the roundtable was focused on professional questions for those working at the intersection of digital humanities and italian studies, the panelists and audience agreed that there is a continued need for documenting the specific research questions and results that are enabled by digital projects. intentionally, panelists' research topics spanned diverse centuries, themes, genres, and objects within italian studies. that same diversity is represented in the four articles in this section: visual, spatial, textual, and aural culture from the medieval through modern periods. each contribution adopts a different suite of analytical methods, but they all share a commitment to the value of a combined digital and non-digital investigation of italian culture. the digital humanities projects from which this scholarship arises likewise represent different scopes and various stages of completion, highlighting both the importance of thoughtful project management and the opportunities to achieve results even in early phases of development. these four pieces attest to the rich variety of outcomes within digital environments. the nature of digital, networked resources allows scholars to learn about their materials both in the creation of the project and through its eventual use. while the early stages of a project are often only available to the group of collaborators, once finished (or at least once they have been made public), the resources are available to the scholarly community. excellent work has been done across italian studies to create digital projects.1 the articles in this section are an invitation to expand that networked community and the groups of users of these sites and tools. the presentation of these projects and their research results is particularly timely, given the seemingly perpetual professional debate about the status of digital humanities (dh) and outcomes 1 for a preliminary list of networked resources and digital humanities projects related to italian studies, see crystal hall, "italian studies and digital humanities: examples of projects and resources," july 31, 2017. http://www.bowdoin.edu/~chall/italiandhresources.pdf http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ https://dhis.mla.hcommons.org/2016/05/23/upcoming-roundtable-on-the-current-state-of-digital-humanities-in-italian-studies/ https://dhis.mla.hcommons.org/2016/05/23/upcoming-roundtable-on-the-current-state-of-digital-humanities-in-italian-studies/ http://www.bowdoin.edu/~chall/italiandhresources.pdf humanist studies & the digital age hall 5.1 (2017) 67 of dh-related research. some of these concerns were echoed in the comments during the roundtable, with a particular interest in how completely digital humanities can address the questions of the field of italian studies, how representative the material is, and if these approaches can offer a "whole picture" of the research question. such concerns gesture towards anxiety about the dominance of technology that we feel in everyday life, a pervasiveness that would seem to erode the interactions, expressive media, and creative outlets that have long been the materials of humanistic study. the four pieces here engage with that monolithic façade by critiquing the digital tools, applying them for their strengths, and acknowledging their limitations. humanists are uniquely aware of the power relationships embedded in infrastructures, the potential blindspots in epistemologies, and the strength of representation. when digital humanities research is conducted by such self-aware humanists, the partnership with computational technologies is rich with discovery, as attested by the scholarship presented in this section. as for the anxieties about complete or total coverage, humanistic work has been at its strongest when it has been an interdisciplinary investigation of a carefully selected group of events, documents, or objects. for example, historians of art, materials, and intellectual traditions work with economists, social scientists, and literary scholars to better articulate the power and influence of the medici court. dh offers a complementary set of methods and materials, not a totalizing or dominating final word on a subject or question. as this scholarly space at the intersection of the two fields grows, awareness of the projects and possibilities will too, which is the purpose of this collection of essays. while each article offers specific contributions to subfields of italian studies, every piece also describes methods and their evaluation for those who are considering adding dh to their scholarly perspective. isabella magni offers a poignant articulation of the research questions and preliminary answers derived from the petrarchive, a collaborative endeavor involving magni, wayne h. story, and john a. walsh. the site is hosted by indiana university and supported by an internal new frontiers start-up grant. the project builds upon storey's edition and commentary of petrarch's rerum vulgarium fragmenta (rvf). magni is particularly interested in the visual meaning of petrarch's songbook. by focusing on the text encoding initiative (tei) guidelines for adding metadata to the text and the visual display options available through html, magni explores the ways in which patterns of composition, use of page space, and scribal hands can add meaning to our understanding of petrarch's poetics. the visual index created by the project team allows the scholar to have a comprehensive view of the manuscript structure of vat. lat. 3195, the partial holograph of the rvf. using the privileged perspective afforded by this digital reconstruction of petrarch's 366 poems, magni is able to pose and resolve a series of analytical questions that also incorporate historical contextualization, close reading, attention to figurative language, and a thematic understanding of the rvf. the article investigates the place of vat. lat. 3195 in the shift from medieval to humanistic representations of texts, the poetic meaning encoded into blank page space (beyond the oft-mentioned seven blank pages preceding rvf 264), and the phases of preparation of this unfinished partial holograph. as magni demonstrates with multiple examples, the attentiveness to materiality while digitizing through encoding acts as an extension of philological practices, which add layers of understanding to the poetics of the rvf. http://dcl.slis.indiana.edu/petrarchive/ humanist studies & the digital age hall 5.1 (2017) 68 an indirect strength of magni's piece is the critical investigation of xml tagging (with tei) and html encoding, two of the cornerstones for the retrieval of data, navigation of the web, and visualization of information. the thoughtfulness applied to the functionality of these digital structures moves certain aspects of this humanistic investigation toward a better understanding of the systems that currently mediate our world. behind the scenes of this article (if it is being read through a browser window) are these very tools, operating so invisibly that they seem nonexistent. as alan liu (2012) has forcefully articulated, the a-critical consumption of these technologies gives them a power that humanists would interrogate and approach with skepticism if they were but removed from our immediate moment. by making the xml and html explicit actors in the construction of the analysis, magni demonstrates their strength as a learning tool as well as their limitations for capturing other aspects of the text. similarly, andrea gazzoni engages with the capacities of geographic information systems (gis) for representing the spatiality of dante's commedia. gazzoni's project, mapping dante: a study of places in the commedia, demonstrates the work that is possible for a single scholar using free software. after receiving initial funding through the price lab for digital humanities at the university of pennsylvania in may 2015, gazzoni was able to launch this interactive digital map of the 340 places named in the divine comedy in may 2016. the site takes advantage of full text of the passages that include one of these places, visualization of geographic patterns, cumulative information about the spatial references in the three cantiche, and a bimodal network visualization of the ways in which places connect the 100 canti through these references. the accumulation of spatial information about the commedia offers the dante scholar multiple entry points for evaluating apparent trends and exceptions to those trends within the historical and textual contexts of the poem. for scholars new to gis, but interested in applying such analysis in their own research, gazzoni's project description is a transparent and accessible guide to practical steps and theoretical considerations. mapping dante capitalizes on the layered nature of gis that facilitates connections between cartographic and non-cartographic data that results from intensive close reading of the entire commedia. while being attentive to the fact that the patterns visualized on the map are subject to evaluation and interpretation, much like the features of the text themselves, gazzoni highlights that the structure of such maps allows for a multiplicity of perspectives, multimodal expression, and the construction or deformation of different possible realities, and, as such "they end up resembling the ways medieval geography worked." like nearly all practitioners of literary gis, gazzoni directly confronts the challenge of uncertain, ambiguous, and fictional locations and a system, but approaches the issue as a non-diegetic mapping project which draws the user's attention specifically to the non-correspondence between the poem and the places mentioned within it. by remaining vigilant about the affordances and the specific limitations of the gis platform, gazzoni is able to reveal how closer inspection of these patterns adds new layers of understanding to the poetics of the commedia. the heterogeneity of dante's use of spatial references is captured on the map through a series of analytical categories for each marker. in this way, gazzoni highlights dante's strategies for creating intimacy and distance with the reader through the use of different kinds of places. in one example, those sites that can be experienced in 14th-century italy stand in sharp contrast to those that exist as ancient cultural symbols. the specificity of gazzoni's reading of the text also allows for this kind of analysis to occur at the level of the speaker, considering the characterization of cacciaguida or beatrice, for example, via their references to specific cities or http://www.mappingdante.com/ http://www.mappingdante.com/ humanist studies & the digital age hall 5.1 (2017) 69 regions, and earthly or heavenly sites. overall, gazzoni demonstrates how many new analytical doors can be opened by digitizing one aspect of a text in service of a specific question. my contribution to this section articulates a similar result: in order to assess the rarity or commonality of the similarity between galileo galilei's prose and ludovico ariosto's poetry, i had to gather significant information about communities of early modern texts. much like the patterns as yet unexplored in mapping dante or the petrarchive, the indications of similarities between texts other than galileo's letter on comets, il saggiatore (1623), and ariosto's epic poem orlando furioso (1532) remain to be analyzed. as an exploratory part of the in-development project galileo's library, this piece uses very elementary computational text analysis in conjunction with close reading and historical interpretation in order to explore the strength of the intertextuality between galileo and his favorite author. for evaluation, that relationship is contextualized against the similarities between 45 other texts and ariosto's poem. the results are patterns that are interesting for my specific question, but open the doors for other questions about the authors in this small corpus of early modern and late renaissance works. with the networked resources and opportunities for collaboration, mapping dante, the petrarchive, and galileo's library are examples of resources awaiting communities of future users. with the example of simple pattern matching of similar phrases, the contribution on galileo's ariosto expands the known contours of the stylistic fields delimited by ariosto and torquato tasso's poetics in the sixteenth century. while only some of the similar phrases carry a literary or figurative value that adds meaning to the text, the remainder probe the contours of those communities across genre boundaries, and notably across chronological periods as well. by remaining in the relatively well-studied area of these literary debates about poetics, the article seeks to build trust in computational text analysis by exploring the textual relationships from multiple angles. there are more complex methods available (normalizing the texts, using fuzzy matching, or applying topic modeling), but with complexity comes further assumptions built into the code and further specificity for what patterns can be identified. by focusing on the text as it would have appeared to readers in the period, the process of analysis reflects my concerns about the contextualized understanding of textual similarity. in common with the other contributions in this section, the article promotes a critical, self-aware application of selected tool in service of a question, not for the sake of using a tool. serena ferrando contributes a next step to this conversation, by describing how the collection of soundscape data can influence artistic and scholarly understanding of an urban environment, and then engaging the public that inhabits that urban space in the presentation and analysis of the results. audioscan milano uses sounds from 1,580 recordings in milan's piazzas and streets to create music that is digitally mapped in an interactive multimedia installation. the project finds historical roots in the studio di filologia musicale and inspiration in the musical theorization of noise. the critical engagement with the technologies and methods of remixing stays at the forefront of the audioscan project for the express purpose of building a stronger engagement with the audience. this can be seen both in the database of recordings available to the public and the interactive installations that invited participation from visitors. ferrando offers an historical analysis of the earlier studio and its reincarnation in the audioscan milano project. with attentiveness to the capacities and shortcomings of technology for accessing and documenting urban sounds, the article outlines the roles of the artists and the urban dwellers in consuming, processing, and evaluating that soundscape. while there is significant overlap https://research.bowdoin.edu/galileos-library/ http://www.giorgiosancristoforo.net/2013/01/03/project-audioscan-transforming-city-noise-into-music/ humanist studies & the digital age hall 5.1 (2017) 70 in the interest of both parties, ferrando highlights the disparities of knowledge and analysis that make the recordings valuable to each group. importantly, the complex artistic and scholarly work of remixing the urban sounds into music was the least understood or accessible to the public audience. the interactive database instead generated the most widespread interest. the audioscan milano results gesture toward an important aspect of digital, and digital humanities work. the ubiquity of electronic and digital media would suggest a cultural accessibility that borders on transparency, when in fact the critical assumptions, epistemologies, intellectual argumentation, and peer evaluation within those digital infrastructures is nearly always opaque. artists, historians, literary scholars, and cultural scholars contribute in meaningful ways to the uncovering and analysis of those structures. magni, gazzoni, myself, and ferrando all offer avenues of exploration into the technology while suggesting the valuable research results that can be achieved with its application. we have completed this work fully aware that, in its most extreme expression, digital humanities work has been criticized as empiricist, secular, and reductive of the creativity of human expression to a mathematical elegance that perhaps no longer carries the evocative mysteries of the original object or experience of it. yet, these essays suggest the opportunities for humanists who control the methods rather than be controlled by them. the critical, selective application shifts the balance of power toward a humanist perspective, articulates a thoughtful and powerful epistemology, in the name of better understanding how our materials communicate meaning to our audience. in a future in which the public role of the humanities will likely continue to be debated, this nexus of the causality of algorithmic formulae and the open-endedness of multiple, often ambiguous, layered interpretations could very well be the site for declaring the connection between our valuable work as humanists and ultracontemporary societal concerns. humanist studies & the digital age, 5.1 (2017) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.7264/n3xs5ss0 reflections on the academic book of the future1 marilyn deegan and guyda armstrong abstract a thorough, lucid and informative survey of the various kinds of transformations of the academic book in the digital era. introduction this article had its genesis in the joint paper we gave at the scholarly networks and the emerging platforms for humanities research and publication colloquium in april 2015. at that point, we were at the beginning of the academic book of the future project, which had been funded to run for two years from october 2014 by the uk’s arts and humanities research council and the british library. as we write this contribution, the project has just launched its two final reports, a project report by marilyn deegan and a policy report by michael jubb (deegan, 2017; jubb, 2017). the project was conceived of in response to widespread concerns about books, publishing, libraries and the academy. declining monograph sales, rising serials prices, funding problems, rapidly-changing new technologies, shifting policy landscapes, increasing pressure on academics to do more with less, all contributed to a sense of unease about the health of the academic book in the arts and humanities, and indeed about the health of the disciplines themselves. the project was run jointly by university college london and king’s college london, with consultancy support from the research information network (academicbookfuture.org). it also drew on expertise from across a widespread community coalition of academics (from students to senior professors), publishers, intermediaries and policy makers. some hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals have been involved, and many useful deliverables produced. the project had, and continues to have, considerable impact, and some of its activities, for instance academic book week (acbookweek.com), will continue for the foreseeable future. as the famous (and variously attributed) quote goes, predictions are difficult, especially about the future. but there are a number of new developments that may point to diverse futures for different kinds of books. some of these are infrastructural and hold out promise of sustainable models; others are individual and experimental, and may point to some new and interesting possibilities. we need both, but we must bear in mind that some of the new models will not stand the test of time. 1 a version of this article also appears as chapter 8 in the academic book of the future report (deegan 2017). http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://academicbookfuture.org/ http://acbookweek.com/ humanist studies & the digital age deegan and armstrong 5.1 (2017) 47 the general assumption is that, with a few exceptions, any new models for the book (academic or otherwise) will be digital. however, during the course of the project we have observed an enduring attachment to print that is neither sentimental nor habitual: print just happens to do some things particularly well, and will no doubt continue to do so. the relationship between print and digital technology is a complex one, and the development of nonprint book forms of increasing functionality, alongside this enduring popularity and usefulness of the printed book, has been a key research area for the project, (see o’sullivan, 2017). print books have been produced using largely electronic means for several decades, and in parallel with developments in the commercial world, the academic community, notably in digital humanities (dh), has been influential in the advancement of methods and standards for the conversion and publication of digital text and media, and in producing pioneering innovative resources. definitions there are several terms used for books delivered in non-print form: e-books, enhanced e-books, enhanced monographs, and it is difficult to distinguish precisely between these. normally, an ebook is a digital version of print, delivered in a standard publishing format (pdf, epub etc); it may have some added features (links, searchability) but little functionality beyond this. enhanced e-books have more functionality, and may include maps, diagrams, narration, multimedia, and there have been some publisher experiments with the development of book apps, for example the faber/touch press versions of shakespeare’s sonnets and t.s. eliot’s the waste land.2 it is difficult to know where the boundary between an enhanced e-book/book app and an enhanced monograph lies. there is a continuum of functionality, though enhanced ebooks are more likely to be stand-alone rather than networked. the andrew w. mellon foundation has created a set of features for the (enhanced) monograph of the future (again, assumed to be digital), based on discussions across the humanities in the us. they should: be fully interactive and searchable online together with primary sources; support platform independent annotation; incorporate privacy metrics; be preservable for the long term; be portable across reader applications. they should also be fully peer reviewed and of high quality (waters, 2016). the adoption of scholarly e-books and enhanced monographs has been much slower than the adoption of e-journals. physical books have affordances that enable users to do things that are much more difficult with e-books (including annotating them, having several open at the same time, and so on). numerous recent studies, confirmed by our discussions with scholars, have also shown that mental retention of complex texts is better with print than electronic. see for instance oapen’s final report (collins et al, 2016) and myrberg and wiberg (2015). the robb (2015) review of words onscreen: the fate of reading in a digital world by naomi baron reports that in a survey of over 300 university students in the u.s., japan, germany, and slovakia, they found a near-universal preference for print, especially for serious reading. baron concludes that ‘digital reading is fine for many short pieces or light content we don’t intend to analyze or reread’, but not for longer pieces that we need to absorb and retain (xii). but see also 2 shakespeare’s sonnets. http://shakespeares-sonnets.touchpress.com. accessed 1 july 2017. the waste land. http://thewasteland.touchpress.com. accessed 1 july 2017. http://shakespeares-sonnets.touchpress.com/ http://thewasteland.touchpress.com/ humanist studies & the digital age deegan and armstrong 5.1 (2017) 48 jabr (2013) who cites a number of experiments which showed that retention and knowledge creation from long texts was enhanced when participants had read printed texts rather than digital. however, he also suggests that perhaps we are making the wrong comparisons, and that ‘when it comes to intensively reading long pieces of plain text, paper and ink may still have the advantage’. but this is not the only way to read, and these are not the only kinds of texts we are exposed to. there was never any assumption that a new device would be needed for e-journals, but for books there have been many years of development spent in search of something that would mimic as closely as possible the format of the printed book. 1990s experiments in e-book readers were mostly failures because of limited capacity, an uncomfortable reading experience, high price and lack of content. the runaway success has been amazon’s kindle, which achieved market dominance largely through its critical mass of available titles, and its availability as both a standalone device and an app that can run on phones, tablets, etc., with the ability to synchronize the reading experience across all of these. all kinds of books are available, from trade novels to complex academic works. the experience of reading on kindle and other readers, however, is somewhat linear, which makes novels and other linear formats easy to read, but is not well adapted for more complex works like scholarly monographs. in addition, the ownership of the text remains with the provider, and not with the reader, who can find books withdrawn from their kindle portfolio any time amazon decides; see the 2009 case regarding george orwell’s 1984, for instance (johnson, 2009). e-book providers license the books to their customers, and licensing is not owning. most scholarly publishers now offer electronic versions of academic books alongside print; as jubb points out, libraries are increasingly opting for these for a variety of reasons (jubb, 2017). at the same time as the commercial world was seeking an e-book platform, scholars were experimenting with more flexible, interactive, interwoven formats, exploiting new theories and technologies around hypertext. in the early days of humanist engagement with digital tools, the printed book, it was suggested, was too linear to represent new forms of thinking about text; only computerized hypertexts could represent new scholarly concepts. however, in the 1990s, when these ideas were taking hold, the practical problems of realizing them computationally meant that few actual products appeared, and those that did were often short-lived because of cost, rapidly-moving technologies and low uptake. electronic editions and digital imaging projects scholarly editions are a particularly complex category of books, and as such may offer some interesting models for all kinds of academic books of increasing functionality, and for new kinds of projects that develop scholarly outputs of differing types and scales. computers have been used to prepare and analyze texts and sources for the last two decades, and to present the resultant editions. one huge advantage is the almost limitless capacity of digital technology for including or linking to primary sources. editors of works that occur in multiple manuscripts (the bible, chaucer, various classical and medieval texts for example) have, over centuries, evolved a shorthand for presenting the evidence of the multiple texts in constrained print book form, with the choice of a ‘base’ text to present in full, and then the use of various kinds of sigla to represent where and how variant texts diverge from the base form. print editions of primary sources are miracles of ingenuity in the use of the page, with apparatus, notes, variant readings. etc., but the limitations of printing, and copyright issues, have meant, for example, that images of humanist studies & the digital age deegan and armstrong 5.1 (2017) 49 the manuscript could rarely be presented along with the transcriptions, variants and analyses. however, editing in the new media releases these constraints, and images of all manuscripts of a text, with full transcriptions and apparatus can be presented alongside the text itself. this has some interesting consequences: 1) editing projects are often much larger than hitherto, given that many more witnesses can be included, and this has led to more collaborative editing, with large teams, often over considerable distances, being responsible for a project; 2) some electronic editions are produced by publishers, most are not; 3) some editions have print versions as well as electronic editions or accompanying archives; 4) there has been intense debate over whether the products of the many online editing projects are editions or archives; 5) in the large teams necessary to produce the editions, it is difficult to apportion individual credit for promotions and career advancement. electronic editions are of huge value to those who create them— otherwise, why would they expend so much time and resource on their production? but there is a degree of disquiet about the electronic format as opposed to print for a number of reasons, as follows. electronic editions are endlessly mutable and can change from one day to the next; this is claimed as a benefit by many as errors can immediately be corrected, but it is seen as a major disadvantage by others who have concerns about the stability of the scholarly record, something that is not in question with the printed book (and see below for issues of digital preservation). one large scholarly editing project (possibly the world’s largest), oxford scholarly editions online (oseo), is making available online existing print editions published by oxford and many other publishers. the editorial board of the project had long and hard discussions about how to deal with errors and corrections in existing works, and the decision was made to produce the editions exactly as they existed in print, even if they were known to contain errors. where possible these errors have been annotated, but it was more important to be true to the originals than to correct them. this of course is not just a problem with editions, but with any text delivered in digital format. version control and fixity are key concerns. sondheim et al (2015) summarize many of the views of scholars about the benefits of the new media, who employ a ‘rhetoric of digital improvement on the printed page,’ and they quote robinson, who asked in 2010 ‘who would publish a scholarly edition in print, now that the digital medium exists?’ but despite the many advantages of digital editions, they have not replaced print altogether. many readers do not either want or need the mass of evidence that is available in the digital forms; they just want to read the text. there is, too, the problem alluded to above, the stability of reference. the preservation of the digital formats is also still a concern: more on this below. and despite much research into screens and interfaces, a well-produced printed page can present complex information in a format that is both comprehensible and aesthetically pleasing. this, of course, is vital to all scholarly works, but it is particularly important in the presentation of editions, where there can be several layers of editorial commentary on each page. one claim made for large-scale online editions that are much more like archives is that every reader can create his or her own edition, but there are very few readers who want or need to do that. most are more than satisfied with a print or e-book edition, produced by trustworthy scholars, so that they can interact with a reliable text with appropriate additional materials. there have been a number of influential projects in classical studies that have developed tools, techniques, metadata structures that feed into considerations of new forms and formats of publications. the earliest and possibly best-known is the perseus digital library at tufts university which has been in existence for a little more than 30 years, through many generations of hardware and software, and now contains a large corpus of greek and roman texts and artefacts, as well as materials from other periods. digital research and digital publication have transformed the field of papyrology, the study of ancient documents. the documentary data humanist studies & the digital age deegan and armstrong 5.1 (2017) 50 bank of papyrology at duke university in the us is more than 30 years old, and gives access to greek and latin documents written on papyrus, ostraca, or wooden tablets gathered from all over the world. great advances have been made in the ability to read and publish ancient documents using new scientific methods. some, like the digital image archive of medieval music (www.diamm.ac.uk), have used commercial products such as photoshop to enhance images and reveal hitherto unknown works. others are using advanced multi-spectral imaging: the dead sea scrolls project (http://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/) and the archimedes palimpsest (http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/) for example, and damaged artefacts that were once impossible to read, such as the carbonized papyrus scrolls from herculaneum, can now be deciphered with the aid of techniques such as x-ray phase contrast tomography (bukreeva et al, 2016). enhanced monographs scholarly monographs, even the simplest of them, and even in print form, have intricate organizational structures, notes, indexes, tables of content, sections, tables, and/or illustrations. given this, they are not particularly well served by current e-book reading devices; enhanced monographs might represent better the complexities of scholarly argument than the less functional e-book. current examples of enhanced monographs range from monographs or collections that have a print instantiation and an oa version on line, presented in such a way as to permit and encourage annotation, commentary and blogging from a wider community, to highly complex multimedia presentations with interwoven text, images, and time-based media. two examples of the former are the second edition of debates in the digital humanities and kathleen fitzpatrick’s planned obsolescence: publishing, technology, and the future of the academy. we offer some examples of the latter below. an early experiment in enhanced monographs was the gutenberg-e program that ran for ten years from 1998 and received around $1.7 million dollars of funding from the mellon foundation. the project was a collaboration between the american historical association (aha) and columbia university to develop and legitimize new modes of historical scholarship, and to prove a business case for doing so. the program was judged a failure from the business perspective (see seaman and graham, 2012), and ‘none of gutenberg-e’s stakeholders considered as their primary objective determining how to create something that scholars actually wanted to read and use’. however, many of the individual monographs themselves have been highly successful in demonstrating the power and possibilities of new developments. as seaman and graham point out, ‘some of the gutenberg-e authors, in close collaboration with editors and technologists, gave us a brief glimpse of a different future’ (282). see for example lowengard (2006) and kirkbride (2008) both of which have made excellent use of the digital technologies, and produced something that would not have been possible in printed form. however, gutenberg-e was an expensive experiment that was not, and never could be scalable, given that not all monographs, extended or otherwise, are supported by large grants from major foundations. nevertheless, it was highly valuable for the lessons learnt. in order to encourage projects that would be scalable and would develop infrastructures for monograph publishing, the mellon foundation has funded a number of projects over the last two years to develop capacity in the us; some $10 million has been disbursed to 21 projects. a http://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/ http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/ humanist studies & the digital age deegan and armstrong 5.1 (2017) 51 report by john maxwell and his colleagues at simon fraser university (maxwell et al, 2017) analyses 13 projects funded by mellon in 2014 and 2015 that are intended to inject capital into change the monograph landscape in the us. maxwell et al identify three areas of crisis in monograph publishing in the us, which are probably also applicable to the uk situation. these are an economic crisis, a ‘first book’ crisis, and an innovation crisis. the third, the innovation crisis, presumes that the monograph is stuck in an old-fashioned print-based groove and has not, unlike journals, taken full advantage of all that the digital has to offer (though we would query whether the majority of journals have taken advantage of innovative digital forms either). one of the mellon’s aims in funding the new program is to ‘incorporate modern digital practices into the publication of scholarship in the humanities and ensure its dissemination to the widest possible audience. does this, however, necessarily imply that the monograph needs to be enhanced? and are ‘modern digital practices’, whatever they may be, and wide dissemination necessarily the same thing? humanities scholars are in fact well versed in modern digital practices, and the use of digital resources is, according to sutherland (2017) ‘altering the contours of humanities scholarship’. but the results of such new tools and techniques does not necessarily yield new forms of output: monographs and journal articles are still the preferred choice of most authors and readers, whether they appear in print or electronic form. some examples of enhanced monographs new york university libraries and nyu press are in receipt of a mellon grant of over $750,000 for their enhanced networked monographs program which will bring together communities of readers through commentary and annotation. publications will be part of a semantic network that offers precise and relevant discovery of concepts within each work, among other functions. the corpus of monographs to be enhanced includes backlist books from nyu press and its project partners, university of michigan press and university of minnesota press, and new books from nyu press, though as yet there are no precise details of titles. manifold scholarship, another mellon-funded project, is a partnership between the university of minnesota press and the city university of new york’s gc digital scholarship lab to create enhanced networked monographs. manifold scholarship, according to maxwell, ‘is meant to be a hybrid, producing a book but also hosting the iterative discourse contextualizing the book’. a good example of this is the debates in digital humanities volume from minnesota, discussed above, which is made available in an open access networked version for commentary and interaction. other forms of enhanced monographs situate a text within a network of nontextual materials, for instance, enchanting the desert, by nicholas bauch, intended as one of the first products to be developed under stanford university’s mellon-funded initiative for the publishing of interactive scholarly works. this interactive work is a book-length examination of henry peabody’s 1905 slideshows of the grand canyon, which creates a digital prototype for studying cultural and geographical history. there were two interesting, and very different, enhanced monographs produced by oxford university press in 2015. the first is the ethics of suicide by margaret pabst battin (battin, 2015). the print publication is a condensed version which is connected to the online instantiation of the same book using qr codes, which in turn links to online versions of primary sources, or to library catalogue records of print sources, as well as interactive features that allow readers to submit corrections, suggest additional sources, and discuss the issues covered in the humanist studies & the digital age deegan and armstrong 5.1 (2017) 52 book. the digital archive version of the book is produced as a blog, with the full text of the book freely available, plus extensive supporting material. the production of this work resulted from a close collaboration between the author, the press and the university of utah library. the second is composition in the digital world: conversations with 21st century american composers by robert raines (raines, 2015) which features in-depth interviews with leading composers of contemporary classical music and explores the impact of digital technology on the creative process. produced and sold as a printed book, oup have also made available a website where each of the 28 chapters has links to the composer’s web page, as well as a whole range of sources: audio, video, scores, youtube links, and interviews. in archaeology, the primary source materials are physical places and the objects of material culture that are discovered there. so for archaeologists, their scholarly outputs are likely to be enhanced with photographs, maps, site plans, drawings, gis, and scientific data of many different kinds. while books and articles interpreting that data have always been, and still are, of vital importance, the digital has been paramount in enabling scholars to incorporate various kinds and formats of data into the arguments and interpretations. digital archaeology, claims morgan, represents an exciting platform for the work of archaeologists, not only through publications or blogs, but also through digital augmentation of archaeological sites. she points out that digital archaeology moves so fast, if she were to write a book about it, it would be outdated by the time it was published. digital media is therefore essential. (archaeology and art history symposium report, 2016). art historical research has been enhanced by the availability of good quality online sources such as artstor, and there are also innovative digital art historical publications appearing, such as the getty’s pietro mellini inventory in verse, 1681, released in 2015, which presents highresolution images of the manuscript, an italian transcription and an english translation, essays, and commentary.3 through the digital art history initiative, the getty foundation is providing support that allows art historians to explore the opportunities and challenges presented by new technologies. there are many examples that one could cite of online resources in art history, but these tend to be more akin to databases and catalogues than monographs. the (print) monograph is still largely favored by art historians for a number of reasons: the quality of reproduction of images and their placement in relation to commentary; rights to images which are harder to secure for online publication; the enduring popularity of art books for a wider public. in musical scholarship, the monograph is limited in its ability to represent, on the one hand, the printed sources of music under discussion, and on the other hand any sense of music as sound. we discuss above the oup experiment in presenting mixed media resources in association with a book on composition; another promising example presents the complex first editions of chopin’s published output: there are now three major linked online resources for these, all developed under the direction of professor john rink (http://www.chopinonline.ac.uk). in 2010, rink and christophe grabowski published the annotated catalogue of chopin’s first editions, the most ambitious and comprehensive research ever carried out on these works (grabowski and rink, 2010). rink had already begun work on the chopin first editions online (cfeo) resource, with the aim to present as many of the editions as possible in high quality digital form. 5,500 images from more than twenty libraries are available in the edition, and rink also conceived of the online chopin variorum edition (ocve), a diachronic view of chopin’s works. the catalogue is a major work on scholarship in print, and its conversion to digital format, and its integration with cfeo and ocve have 3 http://www.getty.edu/research/mellini/ . accessed 1 july 2017. http://www.getty.edu/research/mellini/ humanist studies & the digital age deegan and armstrong 5.1 (2017) 53 created a wealth of content for both scholars and performers which could never have been achieved in print format. in digitizing history, one of the great uk achievements has been the old bailey online (https://www.oldbaileyonline.org) and the various projects that have adopted its robust methodologies, for instance, london lives 1690-1800: crime, poverty and social policy in the metropolis (https://www.londonlives.org); connected histories: british history sources, 15001900 (http://www.connectedhistories.org/). connected histories now federates search across 25 historical datasets. are these all monographs? probably not. but many of them are longform publications which took considerable original research to achieve, and which could not have been published in book form; they are heavily used. old bailey in particular has had considerable impact in the academic and wider communities: old bailey online material formed the basis of bbc1’s hugely successful series garrow’s law, which ran for three series between 2009 and 2011, and won the royal television society award for best drama. it is listed as a key genealogical resource by many archives, for example in the newcastle local studies genealogy guide. however, the federating of resources in connected histories is not without problems— some of the connected databases are protected by firewalls, so are inaccessible to some users. enhanced monographs offer exciting new ways of presenting scholarship, especially in areas where integration of or links to mixed media data is a crucial part of an argument, or where the presentation of large-scale primary sources is a benefit. however, these kinds of monographs are relatively few in number, compared to those which appear in more conventional print or electronic formats, they are costlier to produce, and they require even more input from already hard-pressed scholars. costly and time-consuming individual projects may be possible to develop with large research grants, and can be of great scholarly benefit. but this is not a scalable model. where there does seem to be potential for both scalability and innovation is in the infrastructure developments funded by the mellon foundation to provide stable and secure platforms for digital scholarly works, for example the university of michigan press collaboration with the university presses at indiana, minnesota, northwestern and penn state to build workflows and infrastructure using hydra/fedora, a robust and flexible technical framework and repository system. some of the initiatives discussed here are developing new platforms and workflows for digital book production, in partnership with university presses and libraries. publishers who are currently dealing with producing monographs with a range of print and electronic outputs (reader, smartphone, tablet versions, etc.) have a different set of challenges, and are having to invest in new and complex (and costly) workflows to allow them to publish across multiple channels from the digital files. publishers have had to move away from a paradigm in which their business was to produce print and embrace the production of content that may take many forms. this is no easy task. the de facto standard is to use xml, but the dtds needed for a large publisher dealing with multiple subject areas with different requirements can be large and unwieldy. output requirements change constantly as the hardware, software and operating systems change, and though xml is a standard, not all instantiations of a standard are compatible or interoperable with each other. problems are frequent: a recent scholarly editing project developed by an academic team transcribed all its text using a well-documented tei dtd, then handed the files to a major uk university press to produce a print version. after two years, the press still had not worked out a way to handle the tei files and suggested to the editor that perhaps the solution was to print out the transcriptions and have them rekeyed. https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/ http://www.connectedhistories.org/ humanist studies & the digital age deegan and armstrong 5.1 (2017) 54 new digital developments publishers are increasingly experimenting with new ways of delivering content in long and short forms. the cambridge university press cambridge elements publishes original, concise, authoritative, and peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific research works, organized into focused series edited by leading scholars, and providing comprehensive coverage of the key topics in disciplines spanning the arts and sciences. these are regularly updated and developed from the start for a digital environment to provide a dynamic reference resource for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners. the works on offer are 20,000-30,000 words long (40 to 75 pages), and are available in online, onscreen, and print versions. one of the uk’s newest university presses, ucl press (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press), was conceived of from the start as open access and is engaged in some innovative digital developments. in partnership with the academic book project, ucl press have built a new online publication platform, booc: books as open online content. the format consists of a living book that is hosted on a browser-based platform, and material includes traditional content such as reports and presentations alongside non-traditional genres such as videos, presentations, blogs and storifys. liverpool university press has recently developed using primary sources (https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/pages/using-primary-sources), an open access teaching and study resource that combines rare archival source materials with high quality peer-reviewed chapters by leading academics. covering major themes within the medieval, early modern and modern periods, such as religion, ideas, conflict and class, this provides students with the opportunity to examine rare and original material in detail on their computer, tablet or phone as well as learn how they can integrate the source material in their own written work. culture machine liquid books (http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/liquid-books/) is a series of experimental digital books published by open humanities press under the conditions of both open editing and free content. users are free, nay encouraged, to annotate, tag, edit, add to, remix, reformat, reversion, reinvent and reuse any of the books in the series. the most interesting results of such open editing and writing are ‘frozen’ and published by ohp on the main culture machine site as new versions of volumes in the liquid books series in their own right. see, for example, photomediations: an open book. this series has been set up to explore entirely new ways of writing and publishing and to expressly facilitate experimentation. in a report commissioned by the project, o’sullivan (2017) examines several highly innovative new developments that push at the edges of what we might call an academic book. for example, i ♥ e-poetry (http://iloveepoetry.com), a knowledgebase of short-form scholarship on digital poetry and poetics. the initial concept was to read and write 100 words a day about a new piece of born-digital literature. this now contains approximately 650 posts, totalling some 195,000 words--more than enough content to comprise traditional perceptions of what constitutes a monograph. furthermore, while the entries are short form, they are critical and interpretive, and present new meaning on a consistent theme. this might be categorized as a http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/liquid-books/ humanist studies & the digital age deegan and armstrong 5.1 (2017) 55 multi-authored monograph. this has grown over six years from a personal blog by a single scholar and is expanding its coverage of electronic literature through partnerships and collaboration with electronic literature scholars and projects from around the world. o’sullivan points out that one of the great affordances of digital modes of publication is that they allow us to represent knowledge in new ways, an advancement that facilitates novel interpretation and representation. mapping the catalogue of ships (http://ships.lib.virginia.edu), for example, developed at the university of virginia, illustrates how such an affordance can make complex textual hierarchies more intuitive to readers, demonstrating how the arrangement of the 250-line catalogue of the leaders of the greek forces and the number of their ships listed within ‘book two’ of the iliad corresponds to the natural geography of greece. mapping the catalogue of ships presents an original contribution to its field and the fact that it necessitated digital publication does not detract in any way from its scholarly value. infinite ulysses (http://www.infiniteulysses.com), a crowdsourced annotated edition of james joyce’s multilayered novel, shows how edge cases, which push at the boundaries of what we understand a book to be, might include ‘community books’, projects wherein new knowledge and meaning is created, but through the annotations of the crowd. what is interesting about infinite ulysses is that the entirety of the project’s value is crowdsourced. this is unlike various scholarly collections which have included commenting and annotation features alongside the new scholarship they present; infinite ulysses is taking old material, and giving it renewed significance through open collation. produced by dene grigar and stuart moulthrop, pathfinders (http://dtcwsuv.org/wp/pathfinders/) documents a selection of early born-digital literature. the project emphasizes pre-web hypertextual works from between 1986-1995. pathfinders looks to document the experience of this first generation of electronic literature by recording interactions with the authors of the works, as well as traversals by readers interacting with the pieces. in addition to the audio-visual materials, grigar and moulthrop have written a print monograph, traversals (mit press), with close readings of these works. grigar describes pathfinders as the methodology, and traversals as a process of that methodology. this project is an interesting example of how edge cases interact with more traditional forms, being both resource and insight at once. the virtual paul’s cross project (vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/) is defined as an ‘evidence-based restoration’ of the north-east end of paul’s churchyard in november of 1622. the project was designed to investigate public preaching in early modern london, enabling the experience of a paul’s cross sermon as a performance, as an event unfolding in real time in the context of an interactive and collaborative occasion. it uses architectural modeling software and acoustic simulation software to give access experientially to a particular event from the past – the paul’s cross sermon john donne delivered on tuesday, november 5th, 1622. this is long-form original research that could have been delivered in no other way. non-textual phd theses there have been some recent experiments in non-textual phd theses; while most theses are still produced and submitted in print form, this is not necessarily the most suitable format for practice-based disciplines, or those dealing with material culture. a research project carried out on the british library’s ethos service by manton (2016) found a growing trend for researchers humanist studies & the digital age deegan and armstrong 5.1 (2017) 56 to include multimedia and non-text research outputs in their theses. a workshop organized by the british library’s ethos team explored how phd theses might be able to manifest as knowledge that is not necessarily written, and to discuss how multimodal (mixed media) methods could develop an argument within phd research, and the subsequent difficulties in submitting non-textual work. the participants came mostly from non-textual subject areas, with a preponderance of archaeologists, and they discussed a whole range of multimodal projects, including 3-d reconstructions, archaeological games, and visualizations. problems of access, storage and long-term survival were also touched on, as were the issues around examination and accreditation (foxton, 2016). preservation with the wide variety of forms and formats of the academic book that we have outlined here, a key consideration must be long-term preservation of the digital versions. as the digital preservation coalition points out: the provision of long-term, permanent access to ebooks that have been licensed is ill-defined, and ownership of the responsibility for the preservation of different large categories of digital artefacts that fall under the rubric of ebooks is not clearly established. nor are the costs for carrying out the preservation and establishing sufficient permanent funding to meet those costs. (kirchhoff and morrissey, 2014, 2) in the print world, libraries and archives are the loci of preservation of content, and they retain that role in relation to digital media. but other players also come to the fore: publishers offering gold open access, for example, need to maintain a long and ever-growing backlist of publications and will have enduring responsibility towards them, especially since these represent a continuing income stream, and there are a number of commercial and not-for-profit organizations providing a wide range of services in preserving publications and complex research data. for national libraries, the long-term preservation issues of the national written record, now extended in many countries to the legal deposit of non-print materials, pose particular problems. the sheer volume and diversity of possible acquisitions, and the responsibility to harvest national web sites, is a major undertaking, and in the uk, the legal deposit libraries have implemented a shared technical infrastructure for non-print legal deposit, based on the digital library system first developed by the british library that ensures long-term survivability and access, and the libraries have been working with portico (see below) on a range of preservation issues and possibilities. print is probably a better medium in terms of long-term preservation, though we must not forget that print needs preservation too, but the outreach of online publications hugely outweighs the dissemination levels a paper book can achieve. these issues, which are being debated throughout the library and publishing communities, highlight the complex relationship between preservation and dissemination, engendering the question of how we can successfully deal with both in the long term, as it is increasingly clear that we must. digital media are at risk through media, hardware, software and format obsolescence, through loss of context if the metadata is inadequate, and from the sheer volume of digital material. preservation therefore involves a rich set of technical and administrative processes that https://mode.ioe.ac.uk/2012/02/16/what-is-multimodality/ https://mode.ioe.ac.uk/2012/02/16/what-is-multimodality/ humanist studies & the digital age deegan and armstrong 5.1 (2017) 57 need to be managed within a framework of clear guidelines and policies. because digital data is so complex and varied, and there are so many formats and standards, any one institution will need to adopt a number of different methods which are well-explained and well understood in the digital preservation community; see the various documents and guidelines published by the organizations discussed below. a key and critical issue in digital preservation is authenticity: the maintaining of a resource’s integrity and meaning, even though it may have been transferred between media and hardware several (or indeed many) times. the technical metadata attached to the object to be preserved will, if properly used, guarantee that a chain of custodianship has been maintained, and there are also technical methods for ensuring authenticity such as the use of checksums. to assist with the technical and policy needs of repositories, an international collaboration has established a set of criteria bundled together in the trusted repositories audit & certification (trac) through which repositories can gain levels of accreditation as trusted digital repositories. there are also many projects and services for both giving advice on preservation and offering preservation facilities: the digital preservation coalition (http://www.dpconline.org/); the digital curation centre (http://www.dcc.ac.uk/); oclc (www.oclc.org/); portico (http://www.portico.org/digital-preservation/); lockss (www.lockss.org); national libraries; national archives; commercial organizations concerned with preservation. the european commission has funded many projects in digital preservation through its various ict programs. portico, a us not-for-profit preservation archive is a market leader in academic preservation and is experiencing rising demand for its services; demand for preserving e-books is on the increase, and they also have requests to preserve complex historical data. portico introduced its e-book preservation service (www.portico.org/digital-preservation/services/ebook-preservation-service) to the publishing community in 2008 and in 2011 library participation began. clockss (https://www.clockss.org/clockss/home), another us not-for-profit, has also seen a steady stream of both e-journals and e-books deposited into its internationally distributed network of archives. clockss uses lockss (lots of copies keep stuff safe), an open source digital preservation system developed at stanford university, and in 2016 signed key contracts with cambridge university press, emerald group publishing and iopp publishing, uk. both portico and clockss are now working on dynamic data models for ingest as well. kate wittenberg points out that ‘publishers are handling more distributed, dynamic objects as part of their publications, with content increasingly based on data rather than text, so establishing the best preservation approach will be crucial’ (quoted in pool, 2016). in the uk, arkivum ‘stores a dizzying array of content for organizations in higher education as well as healthcare, life sciences and heritage’ (https://arkivum.com). they have contracts from jisc in the uk, and many uk universities, the new york museum of modern art, the tate gallery, among others, and they handle a very wide range of data types. see pool (2016) for more details of portico, clockss and arkivum. there are also important initiatives where publishers and libraries are working together to ensure that published materials at particular risk are safe. these began with journals, but are now being employed for books. the koninklijke bibliotheek (kb) in the netherlands has been an international leader in this, with the establishment of their e-depot, built using robust standards and metadata that facilitate communication between systems; it is offered as an international service, and major academic publishers have signed up as partners. the kb and portico are partners in the safe places network (ras, 2009). they have defined a set of conditions which trigger action to preserve content which a publisher is no longer able to maintain for a variety of reasons. http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ http://www.oclc.org/ http://www.lockss.org/ https://www.clockss.org/clockss/home humanist studies & the digital age deegan and armstrong 5.1 (2017) 58 it is axiomatic that it is only possible to preserve reliably that which you can control. one problem with enhanced monographs and other complexly interlinked digital publications and resources is that they often connect to many outside sites and organizations, and links are sometimes broken. the use of the digital object identifier is addressing this problem, but not all resources are identified in this way, especially in the humanities, and we have also found instances of broken links even where this is employed. the other problem that is encountered is that of stability and fixity. we discuss above the issues of fixity in relation to electronic editions, but this is also a concern with other kinds of complex networked data. the possibility for constant additions, updates and modifications means that it can be difficult to establish firmly a version of record; hence the importance of reliable metadata systems to keep track of all the processes a resource goes through during its lifecycle. the other issue is the stability of the data that is linked to: even if the links continue to work, there is no guarantee that the resources themselves will maintain their integrity. as the books of the future become ever more networked and multimodal, the preservation problems will increase. innovation is to be welcomed in this area, but this brings with it the problems of preserving access mechanisms which may offer very different sets of functionalities alongside the underlying content, as is the case with the examples above. maintaining functionality in this way, especially when the original developers are no longer managing the resources, is likely to be technically challenging and costly, and it may be that only the content can be preserved, together with metadata that describes the functions of the original object, which could be re-engineered in the future if the need arises. while we welcome the infrastructure developments that unify and standardize platforms for the delivery of enhanced monographs, we must never lose sight of the possibilities offered by the new and experimental, despite the potential problems these may bring with them. the other issue is the contentious one of whether all digital data should be preserved. libraries and archives have always had to make difficult decisions about retention and deaccessioning of content; some pragmatic decisions may need to be taken. the digital preservation coalition’s strapline is ‘our digital memory accessible tomorrow’. digital preservation is one of the most important challenges facing the academy (and indeed the wider world) as we move further and further towards digital and open content. in 2015, the winner of the academic books that changed the world competition was darwin’s on the origin of species (publishers’ association, 2015). it is vital that we think about how many of the books we are publishing this year as enhanced monographs and in open access will still be accessible and influential 150 years hence: preservation remains a key and pressing issue for digital academic books. works cited archaeology and art history symposium report (2016), https://academicbookfuture.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/abf-archaeology-and-history-of-artsymposium-york.pdf arkivum, https://arkivum.com https://academicbookfuture.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/abf-archaeology-and-history-of-art-symposium-york.pdf https://academicbookfuture.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/abf-archaeology-and-history-of-art-symposium-york.pdf https://arkivum.com/ humanist studies & the digital age deegan and armstrong 5.1 (2017) 59 arts and humanities in higher education (2012), the necessity of the humanities, special issue (11), http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/ahha/11/3 the archimedes palimpsest, http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/ baron, naomi s (2015), words onscreen: the fate of reading in a digital world. new york, oxford university press. battin, margaret pabst (2015), ethics of suicide. new york, oxford university press. see also https://ethicsofsuicide.lib.utah.edu/about/ bauch, nicholas (2015), enchanting the desert, http://library.stanford.edu/news/2015/01/stanford-university-press-awarded-12-millionpublishing-interactive-scholarly-works. british library ethos (online theses) service, http://ethos.bl.uk/ bukreeva, i et al (2016), virtual unrolling and deciphering of herculaneum papyri by x-ray phase-contrast tomography, nature scientific reports, doi:10.1038/srep27227 clockss, https://www.clockss.org/clockss/home collins, e. et al (2016), oapen uk final report, http://oapenuk.jiscebooks.org/files/2016/01/oapen-uk-final-report-single-page-view.pdf connected histories: british history sources, 1500-1900, http://www.connectedhistories.org/ culture machine liquid books, http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/liquidbooks/ debates in the digital humanities, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu . http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/ahha/11/3 http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/ https://ethicsofsuicide.lib.utah.edu/about/ http://library.stanford.edu/news/2015/01/stanford-university-press-awarded-12-million-publishing-interactive-scholarly-works http://library.stanford.edu/news/2015/01/stanford-university-press-awarded-12-million-publishing-interactive-scholarly-works http://ethos.bl.uk/ https://www.clockss.org/clockss/home http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/files/2016/01/oapen-uk-final-report-single-page-view.pdf http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/files/2016/01/oapen-uk-final-report-single-page-view.pdf http://www.connectedhistories.org/ http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/liquid-books/ http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/liquid-books/ http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/ humanist studies & the digital age deegan and armstrong 5.1 (2017) 60 dead sea scrolls project, http://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/ deegan, marilyn (2017), the academic book of the future project report: a report to the ahrc and the british library, london. digital curation centre, http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ digital image archive of medieval music, www.diamm.ac.uk digital preservation coalition, http://www.dpconline.org/ e-book preservation service, www.portico.org/digital-preservation/services/e-bookpreservation-service. fitzpatrick, kathleen (2011), planned obsolescence: publishing, technology, and the future of the academy. new york, nyu press. see also http://mcpress.media-commons.org/plannedobsolescence/ foxton, katrina (2016), reasoning without words: envisioning the multimodal thesis and its challenges, https://academicbookfuture.org/2016/09/21/multimodal_thesis/ grabowski, christophe, and john rink, annotated catalogue of chopin’s first editions cambridge. cambridge university press, 2010. grigar, dene and stuart moulthrop, pathfinders (http://dtc-wsuv.org/wp/pathfinders/) grigar, dene and stuart moultrop, traversals: the use of preservation for early electronic writing (cambridge, ma: mit press, 2017). jabr, ferris (2013), the reading brain in the digital age: the science of paper versus screens, scientific american, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/ http://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/ http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ http://mcpress.media-commons.org/plannedobsolescence/ https://academicbookfuture.org/2016/09/21/multimodal_thesis/ http://dtc-wsuv.org/wp/pathfinders/) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/ humanist studies & the digital age deegan and armstrong 5.1 (2017) 61 johnson , bobby (209), amazon kindle users surprised by 'big brother' move, the guardian, 17 july 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jul/17/amazon-kindle-1984 jubb, michael (2017), academic books and their futures: a report to the ahrc and the british library, london. i ♥ e-poetry, http://iloveepoetry.com infinite ulysses, http://www.infiniteulysses.com kirkbride, robert (2008), architecture and memory: the renaissance studioli of federico de montefeltro. new york, columbia university press. kirchhoff, amy and sheila morrissey (2014), preserving ebooks: dpc technology watch report, 14, dpc technology watch series, http://www.dpconline.org/advice/technology-watch-reports kuc, kamila and joanna zylinska, photomediations: a reader, http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/photomediations/ lockss, www.lockss.org lowengard, sarah (2006), the creation of color in eighteenth-century europe. new york, columbia university press. manton, carol (2016), multimedia phd research and non-text theses, http://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2016/09/multimedia-phd-research-and-non-texttheses.html. mapping the catalogue of ships, http://ships.lib.virginia.edu https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jul/17/amazon-kindle-1984 http://iloveepoetry.com/ http://www.infiniteulysses.com/ http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/photomediations/ http://www.lockss.org/ http://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2016/09/multimedia-phd-research-and-non-text-theses.html http://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2016/09/multimedia-phd-research-and-non-text-theses.html http://ships.lib.virginia.edu/ humanist studies & the digital age deegan and armstrong 5.1 (2017) 62 maxwell, john et al (2017), reassembling scholarly communications: an evaluation of the andrew w. mellon foundation’s monograph initiative, journal of electronic publishing, http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0020.101 mellon grant funds u-m press collaboration on digital scholarship (2015), http://www.publishing.umich.edu/2015/04/01/mellon-grant-funds-u-m-press-collaborationon-digital-scholarship/. myrberg, caroline and wiberg, ninna (2015). screen vs. paper: what is the difference for reading and learning?. insights. 28(2), pp. 49–54. doi: http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.236 oapen (oa publishing in european networks), http://www.oapen.org/ oapen uk (2014), researcher survey 2014, http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/researchfindings/researcher-survey-2014/ oclc, www.oclc.org/ old bailey online, the proceedings of the old bailey online, 1674-1913, www.oldbaileyonline.org o’sullivan, james (2017), scholarly equivalents of the monograph? an examination of some digital edge cases, https://academicbookfuture.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/edge_cases_abof.pdf oxford scholarship online, www.oxfordscholarship.com/ pool, rebecca (2016), the rise and rise of digital preservation, research information, https://www.researchinformation.info/feature/rise-and-rise-digital-preservation portico, http://www.portico.org/digital-preservation/ http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.236 http://www.oapen.org/ http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/research-findings/researcher-survey-2014/ http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/research-findings/researcher-survey-2014/ http://www.oclc.org/ http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/ http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/ https://www.researchinformation.info/feature/rise-and-rise-digital-preservation http://www.portico.org/digital-preservation/ humanist studies & the digital age deegan and armstrong 5.1 (2017) 63 publishers’ association (2015), public chooses charles darwin’s on the origin of species as most influential academic book in history, http://www.publishers.org.uk/policy-andnews/news-releases/2015/public-chooses-charles-darwins-on-the-origin-of-species-as-most/ raines, robert (2015), composition in the digital world: conversations with 21st century american composers. new york, oxford university press. see also http://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780199357031/book/ ras, m (2009), the kb e-depot: building and managing a safe place for e-journals, liber quarterly (19), 2009. robb, alice (2015), 92 percent of college students prefer reading print books to e-readers, new republic, https://newrepublic.com/article/120765/naomi-barons-words-onscreen-fatereading-digital-world seaman, john t and margaret b w graham (2012), sustainability and the scholarly enterprise: a history of gutenberg-e, journal of scholarly publishing, 43 (2012), 257-293. see also https://muse.jhu.edu/article/471016/pdf sondheim, daniel et al (2015-2016), scholarly editions in print and on the screen: a theoretical comparison, in digital studies (6), beyond accessibility: textual studies in the twenty-first century, ed brent nelson and richard cunningham, http://www.digitalstudies.org/ojs/index.php/digital_studies/article/view/361/457 sutherland, kathryn (2017), how should we read a monograph? british academy review, 29, january 2017, http://www.britac.ac.uk/node/5490/ using primary sources, https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/pages/using-primary-sources virtual paul’s cross project, vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/ waters, donald j. (2016), monograph publishing in the digital age, https://mellon.org/resources/shared-experiences-blog/monograph-publishing-digital-age/. http://www.publishers.org.uk/policy-and-news/news-releases/2015/public-chooses-charles-darwins-on-the-origin-of-species-as-most/ http://www.publishers.org.uk/policy-and-news/news-releases/2015/public-chooses-charles-darwins-on-the-origin-of-species-as-most/ http://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780199357031/book/ https://muse.jhu.edu/article/471016/pdf https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/pages/using-primary-sources https://mellon.org/resources/shared-experiences-blog/monograph-publishing-digital-age/ humanist studies & the digital age deegan and armstrong 5.1 (2017) 64 reflections on the academic book of the future marilyn deegan and guyda armstrong abstract a thorough, lucid and informative survey of the various kinds of transformations of the academic book in the digital era. introduction definitions electronic editions and digital imaging projects enhanced monographs some examples of enhanced monographs new digital developments non-textual phd theses preservation works cited humanist studies & the digital age, 3.1 (2013) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.3.1.3171 70 the gis forma urbis romae project: creating a layered history of rome james tice, university of oregon abstract: using advanced gis technology and accepted scholarly methods, this multi-disciplinary project intends to create a layered history of rome by updating forma urbis romae, the cartographic masterpiece of ancient roman topography published in 1901 by archeologist rodolfo lanciani. this extremely accurate map measures 25 by 17 ft and uses an innovative graphic system that represents rome’s historic urban fabric as a series of transparent layers from ancient to modern. the map remains the standard archeological reference for rome even though it does not incorporate archeological discoveries uncovered since its original publication 100 years ago. we plan to critically examine, update, and eventually republish the map as an interactive website that will also serve as a dynamic geo-database for scholars and others. our project team will bring its considerable experience in web-based design in the study of the humanities to ensure a highly intuitive product that is accessible, interactive, and expandable. the gis forma urbis romae project is a long term, multi-disciplinary effort involving archeology, art and architectural history, urban studies, cartography, history, and geography. it proposes to explore important aspects of the humanities using digital methods that can facilitate our understanding of history and place. the subject of this inquiry is rome, and the object of our investigation is the cartographic masterpiece and pioneering study of ancient roman topography, forma urbis romae (fig. 1). published in 1901 by the italian archeologist rodolfo lanciani (1847-1929), this map sums up the rich cartographic tradition to be found for rome. today it remains the standard archeological reference for the city even though it does not incorporate the host of archeological discoveries that have come to light since its original publication. this phase of our work is being funded by an american council of learned societies digital innovation fellowship for the academic year 2012-2013. http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ humanist studies & the digital age tice 3.1 spring 2013 71 fig. 1. forma urbis romae, detail, rodolfo lanciani, 1901 we are critically examining, updating, and eventually republishing a new forma urbis romae in the form of an interactive and dynamically evolving “geodatabase” that will document and represent the archeological foundations of the city and their subsequent manifestations in later epochs. in addition to an interactive digital product, our future plans contemplate print versions of the map through periodic releases, or a print-on-demand feature, to record important milestones in the ongoing investigation. our goal for the forma urbis romae project is to create an accessible, robust geo-database that will preserve lanciani’s map in digital form. as a dynamically evolving digital database it will at once permit scholars to access information and invite them to contribute archeological evidence as it is discovered so that the map will accurately update and represent current research. humanist studies & the digital age tice 3.1 spring 2013 72 fig. 2. la pianta grande, detail of the campus martius, giambattista nolli, 1748 background description forma urbis romae was issued in installments from 1893 to 1901. the map not only records the ancient city of rome but also extensive cartographic detail about subsequent historical epochs including early christian, renaissance and baroque, and modern. with his map, lanciani paints a moving portrait of three millennia of human history in the longest continuously inhabited city in the western world. no other city has been recorded in this fashion either in method, scope or scale. the map is drawn at 1:1000 and consists of 46 plates each measuring 25 by 36 inches, which, when combined, yields overall dimensions of approximately 17 by 24 feet, the largest map of rome produced since the severan marble plan, forma urbis, was created in the early third century ad. that monumental plan, almost four times the size of lanciani’s, served as an inspiration for his work; as evidence, the surviving fragments from it are duly drawn and incorporated into lanciani’s own map. lanciani derived his idea in part from an earlier archeologist, luigi canina (1795-1856), who published his maps, pianta di roma antica, in successive editions from 1830 to 1850. canina used a layered technique for linking ancient monuments to the nineteenth-century city of his day and so set the precedent for lanciani’s legible and informative graphic method. perhaps the most profound of all lanciani’s cartographic precedents is the 1748 pianta grande di roma by giambattista nolli (fig. 2). this map was the first accurate map of rome and one of the most influential city maps ever created. its unsurpassed, meticulous detail of the baroque city humanist studies & the digital age tice 3.1 spring 2013 73 reveals important churches, palaces, and extant ancient monuments but also includes bridges, aqueducts, prisons, pawnshops, and even street drains (there are 1,320 sites identified in the index while an additional 700 names appear as text on the map proper, bringing the identified sites to well over 2,000). the nolli map quite literally served as the base for lanciani’s map, as one can clearly see its appearance as the distinctive red layer in the forma urbis romae plates. before examining the significance of lanciani’s work to our project, it is worth commenting upon his creative graphic technique especially since it bears directly upon our visualization methods. being acutely aware of the stratified nature of rome with its successive historical epochs, lanciani captured this profound insight by devising the simple graphic measure of representing the city as a series of transparent layers, each one of which was color-coded for easy visual recognition (fig. 3). taking advantage of late nineteenth-century innovations in lithography, his superimposed plans reveal a palimpsest with three distinct historical strata: ancient and early christian (black), renaissance and baroque rome (red), and modern (light blue). this approach enables the observer to read, cumulatively as well as simultaneously, the temporal evolution of rome. fig. 3. forma urbis romae, plate 15, detail of the campus martius, rodolfo lanciani, 1901 humanist studies & the digital age tice 3.1 spring 2013 74 closer investigation shows how the layered method allows for complex historical and spatial relationships to become readily apparent. for example, in the vatican the lanciani map reveals how nero’s circus (the place of st. peter’s martyrdom in the first century) served as a foundation for the fourthcentury basilica dedicated to that saint (in black) and how that structure in turn provided the armature for renaissance and baroque phases of construction of the basilica which culminated in the seventeenth-century architectural complex (in red). significance of the forma urbis romae project the lanciani map is an important cartographic resource for several reasons. conceptually, it provides a comprehensive historical framework of rome showing spatial relationships horizontally (for places within a given time frame) and vertically (for specific places over time). lanciani’s map was the first to provide a comprehensive plan of the ancient city that accurately represented its constituent elements in their correct spatial relationship and in relationship to one another within the limits of known archeological scholarship of his day. it was also the first map of rome to demonstrate a comprehensive layered understanding of the city that revealed how places in baroque and modern rome were actually shaped by the ancient structure of the city. this aspect of the map highlights the remarkable staying power of ancient structures that have influenced subsequent urban form. for example, lanciani reveals how the configuration of piazza navona with its later baroque embellishments closely follows the footprint of domitian’s third-century stadium on whose foundations it was constructed. while this relationship is well known, his visual depiction of it clarifies one’s understanding and provides a vivid graphic analysis of the spatial evolution of these sites. lanciani’s map was inclusive in its representation of building types and other features. a heterogeneous array of structures such as temples, basilicas, palaces, insulae (housing blocks), granaries, baths, sports complexes, and even ancient trash dumps are shown with remarkable attention to detail. the city’s infrastructure was given equal weight as the depiction of streets, water cisterns, aqueducts, bridges, and street drains testify. taken as a whole, this comprehensive, layered representation of rome is unsurpassed for the wealth of information it portrays and the incisive clarity it achieves. over a century has passed since lanciani published forma urbis romae. to his credit it still remains the most important map of ancient rome ever produced and is therefore still prized as a resource by scholars and historians. details of the lanciani map continue to be published in scholarly works to the humanist studies & the digital age tice 3.1 spring 2013 75 present day with all the errors and omissions of the original. three subsequent reprints of the original map were published in 1990 and 2007 (by quasar). none of these publications, however, update content. the continuing interest in lanciani’s work and the desire to bring it up to date has inspired at least three failed attempts by scholars in the last half century. from our particular vantage point of rigorous spatial analysis and visualization, the most serious limitation of all these attempts (besides their incompleteness) is that they lack the graphic sophistication and immediacy that is the goal of the forma urbis romae project. these well-intentioned but ultimately less than satisfactory trials demonstrate the continuing interest in lanciani’s work, its permanent scholarly value, and the demand for an updated, accessible, and dynamically evolving forma urbis romae. challenge and current status of the project besides lacking currency, the 1901 lanciani map has limitations imposed by the medium in which it was realized: the printed book. the large plates can be cumbersome to handle. it is a trying experience to focus on a zone of the city if it includes multiple plates, separated as they are by distracting joints, or more difficult still, distanced by several pages in the bound version. printing technology in the late nineteenth century limited lanciani to three colors and thus the complexity of the city was somewhat arbitrarily reduced to the same number of temporal layers. annotations were limited by space available so that textual notes did not obscure drawings (these are referenced to the remote seven-volume text that lanciani published to accompany his map). most problematically, lanciani’s map is difficult to update, as we have noted above, and therefore unable to grow with the expanding body of knowledge that in principle it was dedicated to reveal. the fact that the 1901 version has not changed in 110 years is a testament to the inertia that may result when reliance is placed exclusively on print media. our project hopes to demonstrate that all these limitations can be overcome with the knowledgeable use of advanced digital media as it facilitates historical research. the forma urbis romae project’s cartographic interface allows for seamless display and intuitive navigation from the macro scale of the city to the micro scale of individual monuments and details. the numbers of layers employed are theoretically limitless. at the very least, the city’s stratification could encompass eight layers that would cover important epochs: kingdom, republic, empire, early christian, medieval, renaissance and baroque, roma capitale (the period that followed the city’s annexation to italy) and contemporary. in the electronic form under construction for the forma urbis romae project, it will also be possible to access textual information (such as the detailed excavation notes humanist studies & the digital age tice 3.1 spring 2013 76 mentioned above) unobtrusively and efficiently by a simple click of the mouse on a specific site. while the limitations of print media have made past attempts to update the map obsolete by the time they reached the printing presses, the digital database we envision invites constant updates in a naturally evolving format. using state-of-the-art gis technology we are critically examining, refining, and updating the forma urbis romae. it is now possible to augment its content so as to incorporate the most current scholarship available. at the university of oregon, we are uniquely poised to accomplish this ambitious task based on our track record that brought two other major spatial historical resources to the web: “the nolli map interactive website” published in 2005, focusing on the cartography of eighteenth-century rome, and our most recent “imago urbis: giuseppe vasi’s rome” published in 2007. the latter effort culminated in a major traveling exhibition, giusepe vasi’s rome: lasting impressions from the age of the grand tour. the show, curated by james tice and james harper with digital installations by erik steiner, creative director of the spatial history project, stanford university, and ken kato of the infographics lab, opened at the jordan schnitzer museum of art at the university of oregon in 2010 and traveled to the princeton university art museum in 2011. with the advent of innovative digital tools we have seen significant advances in the ability to manage, manipulate, and measure geographic data, and yet only minor advances in cartographic design have resulted. in essence, our approach exploits lanciani’s representational methods to enhance our updated forma urbis romae by taking advantage of current digital tools such as gis, advances in web technology, and contemporary satellite imaging resources such as bing maps (figure 4). humanist studies & the digital age tice 3.1 spring 2013 77 fig. 4. contemporary map of rome, detail of the campus martius, bing maps, 2012 our chief task involves rendering the graphic and attribute contents of lanciani’s original map into a dynamic spatial database and doing so accurately, using state of the art gis tools. building on our assets of the historical and modern gis layers of rome, the ongoing geo-database will become a platform to examine spatio-temporal data from any epoch in rome’s history. in addition to this database, we intend to develop a first iteration of an interactive website (using either flash or drupal) that will allow users to explore and query layer upon layer of the updated map. our work takes advantage of the unique strengths of the technical team specializing in web design, programming, and gis, using the most current technology for managing geospatial data and presenting it on the web. not coincidentally, the project will be hosted at the university of oregon, one of the leading geographic research infrastructures in the country. we are in the process of assessing the accuracy and currency of lanciani’s map. this is being accomplished using two processes. the first is scientific. it is now possible to geo-rectify (carefully align or “rubber sheet”) historic maps such as lanciani’s using gis software (arcgis). a preliminary has been accomplished so that the forma urbis can now be geo-referenced (crossreferenced topographically) with contemporary satellite imaging and coordinated with other scientific surveying techniques in addition to the several dozen original cartographic layers of rome in our collection. the second aspect of the work is to critically examine historical and archeological evidence uncovered since 1901. relying on our own expertise and that of our expert consultants, this information is being geo-referenced into the humanist studies & the digital age tice 3.1 spring 2013 78 map. using a rigorous system to control and verify data in order to correct and amplify lanciani’s work, we are bringing it into correspondence with the most authoritative information available, a development we are sure that lanciani himself would have approved. a substantial proof-of-concept has been completed. the following section details what we have accomplished to date. work accomplished the 46 plates from the original forma urbis romae have been scanned at high resolution using the detailed 1:1000 scale original edition. these plates have then been digitally “stitched” together to form one large, seamless map, in effect creating a digital facsimile of the original plates composed as one unified document. as far as we are aware, our printing of that file in 2008 is the first time the map has appeared as a single sheet, albeit in much reduced form (approximately 42 by 60 inches). this preliminary task would have been much more difficult to achieve before sophisticated digital tools were available. this version of lanciani’s map was first presented at the conference “descriptio urbis: measuring and representing the modern and contemporary city” held in rome in 2008. the newly assembled lanciani map provides us with a template that has become the basis for separating or “delaminating” the layers of the original map itself. using our copyrighted nolli map, the medieval/renaissance/baroque “red layer” has been extracted as a vectorized (scalable) slice and then reinserted into the lanciani master, thus providing a more dynamic and reliable base. furthermore, we have geo-rectified (rubber sheeted) the nolli layer with satellite imagery (bing maps is now state of the art for many cities, including rome) as a separate layer, reaffirming that a high degree of congruence exists between the two. these updated layers provide an accurate, scientific base for the work that follows. humanist studies & the digital age tice 3.1 spring 2013 79 fig. 5. university of oregon forma urbis romae, detail campus martius (with updates), 2012 beyond work on the map as a whole, we have chosen plate 15, one of the 46 plates in the historic center, as a trial segment to explore how we might analyze, represent, and subsequently treat the remaining 45 plates in the future (fig. 5). we selected this plate because it is especially rich in ancient, medieval and baroque monuments. this zone accurately encompasses welldocumented landmarks, such as the pantheon, the piazza navona/stadium of domitian and the alexandrian baths, which can then act as a control for other plates. the same segment, however, also displays very noticeable inadequacies. for example, lanciani incorrectly locates the saepta julia (an ancient voting precinct now established as being next to the pantheon) over a hundred meters away along the via del corso. a host of archeological discoveries that have come to light since lanciani’s publication do not, of course, appear. using this circumscribed yet key map segment we have been able to examine the city, level by level. we have succeeded in “delaminating” the multiple layers that lanciani identified: ancient, early christian (black); medieval/renaissance and baroque (red) and modern, in lanciani’s day (blue). additional layers will show changes since lanciani’s time. it would not be difficult to create sub-layers for the major divisions. for example, we could focus on ancient rome during the reign of augustus (27 bc-14 ad) or, if we wished to switch from a temporal perspective to a topographic/typological mode, we could create a layer that simply focuses on the roman street system from antiquity to the present. we have begun to scrutinize the results, testing the extent to which humanist studies & the digital age tice 3.1 spring 2013 80 the separated layers—now readily examined in their “pure form”—agree with scholarly research that has come to light since the original publication. the results of our trial example have been illuminating. after consulting contemporary scholarship by f. coarelli (roma [guida archeologica], 2005); l. haselberger, (mapping augustan rome, 2002); e. steinby (lexicon topographicum urbis romae, 1993 – 2000) among others, we have corrected errors in placement and faulty reconstructions in the trial segment of lanciani’s map. our test case highlights these corrections and other additions so they become apparent to the viewer. these and many other potential amendments to the 1901 map demonstrate that an updated, dynamic version of forma urbis romae is an achievable goal. another important aspect of the forma urbis romae project is the manner in which lanciani’s cartographic image is linked to textual information. his seven-volume storia degli scavi (history of the excavations) has been digitally linked, in part, from the internet archive (getty research institute). as part of the re-mastered map, we have digitally prepared and georeferenced the following maps for a portion of the map: the third-century severan marble plan; the 1748 nolli map (completed); the 1901 forma urbis romae (completed); sara nistri photogrammetry from the 1950s; and the contemporary bing satellite image (completed). we will construct new layers for the following: ancient rome, early christian rome, medieval, renaissance and baroque rome, modern rome and twentieth-century rome. each new layer reflects current scholarship and also makes evident the errors and gaps in the original lanciani map. in addition we have incorporated a portion of the storia degli scavi and linked it to the re-mastered forma urbis romae. geospatial database management and visualization design the forma urbis geo-database will build on our already robust gis infrastructure developed over the last decade in collaboration with the infographics lab at the university of oregon. the lab’s facility and expertise in managing geospatial data for research and infrastructure projects has been an essential ingredient in the success of our prior work. the lab maintains an “always on” enterprise-level esri arcsde geodatabase and arcgis server to manage the university of oregon facilities services department gis infrastructure for campus mapping, emergency management, and facilities maintenance. this server also houses and serves all of the geographic data for our previous digital projects treating the cartography of rome, as well as several research projects at stanford’s spatial history lab, ensuring a powerful collaborative infrastructure for academic research uncommonly found in academic settings. data may be inputted simultaneously by multiple users from any location over a secure connection, and several levels of user rights management may be implemented humanist studies & the digital age tice 3.1 spring 2013 81 thus facilitating remote collaboration between the three venues of our work: the university of oregon, stanford university and studium urbis (rome). our team is experienced in the area of cartographic and visualization design, particularly with the interactive web-based maps. with such an emphasis placed by lanciani on clear visual representation, we expect to match this standard of legibility and enhance it with interactive features such as animation, linking, and brushing (i.e., interactive filters, for example, by construction date). in concert with arcgis software we are using a suite of graphic design and programming tools to re-master the lanciani map in its updated form (e.g. adobe illustrator, photoshop, and flash/flex). while we plan on matching the visual accessibility of the original map, we will ensure its dynamic nature in the future by recording all elements in a vector database (rather than rasterized versions), which is scalable and versatile (fig. 6). humanist studies & the digital age tice 3.1 spring 2013 82 fig. 6. layers of history diagram: modern rome, baroque rome, and ancient rome (graphics by j. tice) web development, collaboration, and institutional support the final key area of expertise required to implement the forma urbis romae project will be in web development. while our previous two projects continue to function adequately, web technologies are fast developing to support more dynamic sites that are rapidly updated and implement re-configurable modules. in particular, we are contemplating the use of drupal as an appealing open-source platform with which to develop the site. the spatial history project has recently completed a major drupal-based site (http://spatialhistory.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/railroaded/) that includes a user-friendly backend content management system. the support for drupal is strong at stanford, and there is a large pool of developers with which we intend to consult. as we have for our previous work, we also anticipate continuing to use actionscript and adobe flash, which is still the most ubiquitous, engaging, and robust web platform for interactive and animated graphics. finally, we intend to take advantage of the web-mapping tools offered by esri built on top of arcgis server (programmed in flex, silverlight or javascript). in addition to a variety of other sophisticated gis analyses, these tools support basic viewing, querying, and live editing of geographic data. all our work will be in the public domain and freely accessible on the web. the forma urbis romae project is a multi-disciplinary, collaborative project that brings together three individuals who represent the study of archeology, architectural history, architecture, geography and geographic information systems. the overarching interests that all team members have in common are those revolving around the spatial history of place over time and its visualization using digital media. the advantages of this collaboration are twofold: the benefit from individual expertise and also from the assets of collaborators’ home institutions. professor allan ceen is director of studium urbis, a unique research institution in the heart of rome. with its extensive archive of historic maps and library, it specializes in the urban history of rome. since its founding in 2000 the director has authored numerous articles and exhibitions that treat the rich legacy of roman urbanism, architecture, and history. erik steiner is the creative director of the spatial history project at stanford university and has led a number of multidisciplinary research projects that use gis technology to explore the humanities and social sciences. james tice, the principal investigator, is professor of architecture at the university of oregon. along with those colleagues mentioned above, he produced the award-winning website, “the interactive nolli map website” in 2005 and more recently “imago urbis: giuseppe vasi’s grand tour http://spatialhistory.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/railroaded/ humanist studies & the digital age tice 3.1 spring 2013 83 of rome” in 2007. the nolli map website in particular has enjoyed success with scholars and students around the globe and has been featured in various venues including the victor and albert museum in london and the université du québec in montreal. it is intended that the forma urbis romae project will allow scholars from around the world to participate in updating and verifying topographic information about the city of rome. since digital media is rapidly becoming the lingua franca of contemporary cartography, this consortium of scholars, digital designers, and institutions will have a collective power beyond what any one individual could achieve. colleagues at stanford university, the university of rome, penn state university, and other institutions have endorsed our research to date. we believe we are now poised to consolidate our work and will be able to attract major funding from other sponsors. we also believe that the interdisciplinary nature of our work will foster connections among a variety of disciplines that will lead to fruitful curricular development and exchange. works consulted ashby, t. the aqueducts of ancient rome. oxford: clarendon press. 1935. print. benevolo, l. l'area archeologica centrale e la città di roma. roma: de luca edizioni d’arte. 1988. print. carettoni, g. la pianta marmorea di roma antica. 2 vols. roma: ripartizione del comune di roma. 1960. print. carandini, a. atlante di roma antica. 2 vols. roma. 2012. print. castagnoli, f. roma antica: profilo urbanistico. roma: jouvence. 1978. print. coarelli, f. roma [guida archeologica], roma. 2005. print. frutaz, a.p. le piante di roma, 3 vols. roma: instituto di studi romani. 1962. print. humanist studies & the digital age tice 3.1 spring 2013 84 gatti, g. archeologia. roma. 1911. print. giglioli, g. museo della civiltà romana. roma: comune, rip. antichita e belle arti. 1964. print. guidoni, e. l’urbanistica di roma. roma: laterza. 1990. print. haselberger, l. mapping augustan rome. portsmouth, ri: journal of roman archaeology. 2002. print. krautheimer, r. rome: profile of a city. princeton, nj: princeton university press.1980. print. lanciani, r. the destruction of ancient rome. new york: macmillan co. 1899. print. ---. forma urbis romae. roma: quasar. 1901. print. ---. the ruins and excavations of ancient rome. boston: houghton mifflin. 1897. print. ---. storia degli scavi, vols.1-4. roma: quasar. 1902-1912. print. ---. storia degli scavi, vols. 5-7. roma: quasar. 1994-2002. print. manacorda, d. crypta balbi. milano: electa. 2001. print. marigliani, c., ed. le piante di roma delle collezioni private. roma: provincia di roma. 2007. print. humanist studies & the digital age tice 3.1 spring 2013 85 nash, e. pictorial dictionary of ancient rome. london: thames & hudson. 1968. print. richardson, l. a new topographical dictionary of ancient rome. baltimore: johns hopkins university press. 1992. print. rodriquez almeida, e. forma urbis marmorea. 2 vols. rome: quasar. 1981. print. steinby, m. e. lexicon topographicum urbis romae. roma: quasar. 1993-2000. print. valentini, r. and g. zucchetti. codice topografico della città di roma. roma: tipografia del senato. 1940-1953. print. web site bibliography frischer. b., ed. “rome reborn.” university of virginia. 2010. web. <http://www.romereborn.virginia.edu/>. rinne, k., ed. “aquae urbis romae: the waters of rome.” university of virginia. 1998-2012. web. <http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/waters/>. “stanford digital forma urbis romae project.” stanford university. 2002-2003. web. <http://formaurbis.stanford.edu/index.html>. tice, j., e. steiner and a. ceen. “the interactive nolli map of rome website.” university of oregon. 2005. web. <http://nolli.uoregon.edu/>. humanist studies & the digital age, 7.1 (2022) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda/7.1.1 1 the blind spot of the future massimo lollini when i proposed having the future at the center of this issue, which marks the 10th anniversary of humanist studies & the digital age, i was aware of the complexity of this controversial topic. the possibility of magnifiche sorti e progressive — a “splendid and progressive destiny” — made possible by human technology inspires hope in some and critique in others. the expression comes from one of leopardi’s last poems, ginestra o il fiore del deserto (broom, or the flower of the desert), where he uses it ironically to suggest the powerlessnesss of humanity in the face of natural disasters. the poet argues with all those who praise the human condition and progress acritically. he condemns their hubris and bitterly invites them to visit the arid slopes of vesuvius, reduced to a desert by the volcano’s eruption.1 this vision of an earth devoid of human presence is emblematic for many. like leopardi, they doubt the very existence of a future for a society increasingly prey to environmental and technological catastrophism. in contrast, true advocates of magnifiche sorti e progressive respond by pointing to the astronomical advancements in technology that we have seen in the contemporary world. moreover, between these two opposite poles — those who prophesy an extraordinary future for humanity and those who deny even the possibility of a future altogether — are those who do see a future for hyper-technological society, but see it as rather uncertain, if not dark. beyond these distinct positions, however, there is a perception that any conception of the future, no matter how anthropocentric and/or technocentric, can no longer avoid confronting the problems that humans have created in the anthropocene. this awareness — reinforced by the ongoing pandemic and drastic climate change that we have witnessed in recent years — also emerges in some of the essays published in this issue. it prompts us to look closer at the future and argue in favor of a more-than-human humanism; humans should develop a sense of responsibility towards themselves, other animals, the environment, and the technology in which we are immersed and with which we interact. today, we no longer share the same vision of the future with previous eras of modern civilization. over the past few decades, we have started to view the future through a closed perspective and question the idea that it could be better than the past. in adopting this viewpoint, we have begun to consider the future as a threat , and we have entered a new relationship with time, one dominated by the present. this shift in perspective, which does not only concern academia, has taken place above all in what we consider the western world; it happened even before the digital revolution and the new world of telecommunications that have conflated time and space. it is a profound transformation; by asserting the domain of immediacy, it considers the present as the only possible time. even when memory and the study of the past survive in our time, they appear increasingly detached from a future perspective that would give them meaning and direction. we no longer perceive the present with its necessary linkages to past and future, and we are now without contextualization. 1 “dipinte in queste rive / son dell’umana gente / le magnifiche sorti e progressive.” “inscribed on these slopes you’ll find / mankind’s / splendid and progressive destiny” (leopardi, la ginestra, vv. 49-51; pp. 72 and 75). http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://journals.library.oregonstate.edu/hsda http://journals.library.oregonstate.edu/hsda humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 2 for centuries, this contextualization has been central to the very idea of history and political philosophy, as discussed in hanna arendt’s between the past and the future, where she thematizes the present as a “gap” (316). the historian françois hartog, in his regimes of historicity: presentism and experiences of time (2017), has coined the term “presentism” to define our relationship with this era in which “enlightenment has its source in the present, and the present alone.” he concludes, “to this extent — and this extent only — there is neither past nor future nor historical time” (hartog 2015, 203). in this way, we can delude ourselves of the notion that we are walking towards the future, yet we still lack a clear path unfolding in front of us. we can only take a few tentative steps forward, and even then, possibly toward hidden threats — which appear to us in the presentday only as a blind spot. in this publication the idea of the future is discussed above all in relation to technological changes, the emergence of artificial intelligence (ai) and, in some respects, the problems posed by the anthropocene. in the interview education, technology, and humans that opens the “perspectives” section, jeffrey schnapp recounts his brilliant career, in which started as a scholar of dante and the middle ages and then developed to embrace his now-current interdisciplinary interests. among other things, schnapp’s work deals with knowledge design, museums, libraries, media history and theory, history of the book, and the future of archives. the main themes of the interview concern the relationships between technology and pedagogy, the future of reading, and artificial intelligence. schnapp’s point of view is particularly interesting for the discussion of humanism in the age of artificial intelligence. seeing continuity from his training as a medievalist to his most recent research in humanities computing, he reminds us of how it is still important to study dante and the classics. it was in these works that the very idea of humanity originated, and this study remains essential in a time like ours that is characterized by radical technological and pedagogical changes. he holds that the strength of ai and machine learning is pattern recognition at scale. however, in his view, “pattern recognition isn’t thinking; it’s only a first stepping-stone towards thought, many steps removed from critical thought. so, these are powerful tools but, like all tools, they do some things well (especially at more-than-human scales) and other things poorly.” schnapp argues that “the objects of study in the human sciences that ai can serve are new objects of study; they aren’t simply extensions of traditional modes of inquiry.” for this reason, he resists using the label “digital humanities.” the new objects of study require a deeply interdisciplinary approach and often do not even fall within the conventionally understood domain of the humanities: “once you begin working critically and creatively with data as a material and expressive medium, the boundary lines between natural/human/social science have a tendency to become pretty porous.” in this perspective, he considers it necessary to question the more anthropocentric and technocentric aspects of humanism, without having to embrace the transhumanist philosophies that propose a projection of the human beyond the terrestrial dimension. to face the challenges of the future, what we must do instead, he concludes, is face our deepest entanglements with a natural world that we still barely understand. in steps towards the future: more-than-human humanism in the age of artificial intelligence, i first discuss our current idea of the future in the context of carl schmitt’s vision of the spatial revolutions of modernity. the focus is on the conquest of space and the colonization of mars, which is at the center of futuristic and technocratic visions that appear as an attempt to escape from human responsibilities on earth. then, i examine the extent of intellectual hubris expressed in computation, ai (garvin minsky e ray kurzweil), and the philosophy of computing and information (eric fredkin) involved in the elaboration of new theoretical assessments on the ultimate nature of reality. the futuristic and robotic visions of minsky and kurzweil, based on the idea of unlimited expansion of human capacities, are inextricably linked to the issues of the present. humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 3 despite their presentation of a world full of luminous promises, the future they describe appears instead to contain blind spots because of the urgent problems humans face in the present — and the need to come to terms with the long shadow of the past. their vision is then contrasted and made to interact with the ideas of philosopher timothy morton. he has taken the issues of global warming and possible ecological catastrophe seriously, avoided all the futuristic enthusiasms, and preferred to emphasize the radical nature of the transformations that humans are experiencing in the present. in this perspective, ai becomes one of the “hyperobjects,” like the internet or climate change, in which humans are immersed. morton’s hyperobjects delineate an uncanny view of the future, and this uncanniness is not related to the supernatural but the environment. my essay seeks to understand the human position in the face of radical technological transformations induced by cybernetics and ai. in the third paragraph, i discuss anti-humanism, transhumanism, and posthumanism within the broader category of “more-than-human thought,” a label meant to sidestep the possible misunderstandings induced by the words “posthuman” and “transhuman.” indeed, all the philosophers analyzed, even if they declare themselves posthumanists, refuse to completely abandon the idea of the human being. i conceive “more-than-human” in a horizontal sense. the central question is not to empower (transhumanism) or disempower (posthumanism) humans but rather to see them in relation to what is not human, including other animals, the environment, and the machine. the analysis considers the works of cary wolfe, jane bennet, bryant levi, among others, and introduces the ethical debates on cyborgs, robots, and autonomous weapons systems (aws). the real problem, as evidenced at the end of this section, is grounded in the difficulties of finding adequate rules for our new technological realities. then, more importantly, it emphasizes the need to reflect on the very nature of ethics in this era of technological and spatial revolution. the fourth paragraph continues this inquiry, concentrating on the non-standard ethical theories of luciano floridi (computer and information ethics) and david gunkel (the question of the machine). i examine the opportunity and feasibility of including in this discussion on the ethics of our time — characterized by the pervasiveness of ai — a notion of consciousness, as theorized by emmanuel levinas’s humanism of the other and paul ricoeur’s oneself as another. finally, in the last paragraph, i reflect on how the hyperobject anthropocene re-establishes a sense of limit in human history. the climatic threat introduces the possibility of the end of the human world and the realization that earth may continue to exist without humans. however, my essay ends on a note of hope. indeed, awareness of the current challenges of technology can and must express itself in different forms of resistance to the adverse effects of ai in our lives. an ethical approach based on the persistence of the role of human consciousness is essential, but it must be coupled with human decision-making and political action. jeff staiger’s contribution, after the book, the book? the digital writing experiments of françois bon, argues that while most commentators believe the traditional print book will not be replaced by digital media, there has been considerable debate over its possible effect on the forms of the book, given the current widespread digital revolution. one of the most sustained and searching investigations of these effects have been conducted by the french writer, françois bon. in his theoretical writings on the subject, gathered in the book après le livre (after the book), bon makes a strong case for the dependency of literary forms on the “material conditions of their enunciation.” extrapolating from historical examples, he suggests that the book will accordingly undergo major — if yet unforeseen — transformations. he also argues that it is urgent for writers to experiment with the material conditions generated by the digital revolution, lest the field of possibilities be constrained by the commercial interests of large technology companies. true to his sense of urgency, bon himself has engaged in humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 4 a number of experiments with the form of the book in the digital environment; most notably are his “novel” tumulte, which consists of daily blog posts mixing fiction, memoir, criticism and other genres, and a series of digital remediations of his early novel limite. while bon’s experiments raise profound questions about the concept of the book, it is less certain whether they represent viable avenues for the book’s development, since their main appeal is arguably to scholars and theoreticians. considering his concern with forms of organization and delivery, and the ontological complexities arising from multiple versions of the same (or nearly the same) text in a digital environment, bon’s experiments seem to necessarily scant the power of concentrated prose that has been the principle means — whereby books have conveyed thought and sustained intellectual culture. the section “interventions” opens with micaela simeone’s essay: unknown future, repeated present: a narrative-centered analysis of long-term ai discourse. in this piece, she examines the recent narratives and debates surrounding long-term ai concerns — the prospect of artificial general intelligence in particular — and their hidden assumptions, priorities, and values. the analysis employs a humanistic narrative and a close-readingcentered approach to analyze the works of two vocal (and opposing) thinkers in the field, luciano floridi and nick bostrom. using these tools, simeone investigates how the representational, descriptive differences in their works reveal the high stakes of narrative choices in how we form ideas about humanity, urgency, risk, harm, and possibility in relation to ai. this essay convincingly weaves the discourse regarding climate change and slow violence (as defined by rob nixon) into the main argument on how narratives in non-ai-related fields resonate in the two main foci — the perspectives of bostrom and floridi. simeone explores the two philosophers’ differing views on the entanglements of humanity and ai, succinctly summarized as the gradual and the spectacular, with brilliantly articulate, logical, and persuasive reasoning. the idea that today’s technological landscape is or can be one of slow violence is both stimulating and worrying. drawing attention to “the slow violence in ai bias,” simeone puts into focus the problematic scenario of how overcoming our human limitations through technology may eventually bring about the demise of humanity itself, along with its habitat. ultimately, what emerges from her analysis is the degree to which the human factor will be central to conversations about ai and the “ethical and moral implications of digital technology.” with regard to the future of ai and humanity, simeone both establishes the power of storytelling and emphasizes the limitations of a narratological and imaginative scenario forecasting future entanglements. the essay also offers a fascinating investigation into the early modern roots of the current discourse on ai, highlighting how bostrom and floridi’s outlooks both echo the pessimistic and optimistic views of technē in the renaissance. finally, simeone concludes her essay by posing an important political question: how might other voices — particularly, voices from marginalized and disenfranchised groups — offer alternative narrative possibilities to the white, patriarchal, and european perspectives represented by thinkers like floridi and bostrom? the section “interventions” closes with christina linardaki’s essay, poetry at the first steps of artificial intelligence, which explores how the spirit and pervasive ambitions of ai are impacting the composition of poetry. ai attempts in this sphere of art are usually referred to as “poetry generation,” which linardaki first contextualizes within the field of humanities computing. she reveals how poetry generation evolved in the digital humanities and has come to be included in the broader field of computational creativity, which encompasses several areas of art and science. the paper first examines why poetry, out of all other literary genres, is particularly suitable for writing experiments that use ai. some of the characteristics of poetic discourse, including arbitrariness and absurdity as opposed to common discursive practices, make it fertile ground for such endeavors. even human poets have practiced the disruption of common language in their humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 5 poetry, illustrating this fundamental spirit of creativity and flexibility. then, the paper offers a brief historic look at poetry generation, followed by a review of the methods employed to produce poetry generation — either for fun or academic projects. then, the essay displays different taxonomies of generative poetry techniques including carolyn lamb’s, which distinguishes between mere poetry generation and result enhancement, gonçalo oliveira’s, which considers form and content features in poetry generation. linardaki finds that the results of poetry generators are generally poor, especially in terms of meaningfulness, and examines the reasons for this failure, including computers’ 1) inability to understand any word as a sign with a signified, 2) lack of general intelligence, and 3) the reliance on process(rather than output) driven attempts. then, linardaki contrasts computer’s results with computer-like results from several human poetic movements and features, such as dada, stream of consciousness, oulipo, langpo, flarf, and blackout/erasure poetry. the striking similarity between human poets who are concerned more with experimentation than with good poetic results and computer scientists who are process-driven leads to a discussion of the characteristics of humanity, the possibility of granting future ai personhood, and the need to see our world in terms of a new and more refined ontology. the section “projects” opens with jeffrey schnapp’s two projects from the metalab (at) harvard, a presentation that complements the interview conducted by farley and lollini. the first project, a flitting atlas of the human gaze, performs a historical art experiment: using ai-based extraction and analysis, this project allows the visitor to explore the harvard art museum through the eyes of the subjects of artworks. the installation is built upon the ai-based extraction and analysis, fine-tuned via human supervision, of pairs of eyes from the harvard art museum painting, print, sculpture, and coin collections. it allows the visitor, equipped with an input device, to explore the collections from the standpoint of the depicted subject’s gaze direction. the second project, their names, is an online denkmal, or monument, that visualizes names from 28,000+ fatal encounters with american police, dating from the year 2000 through the death of george floyd on may 25, 2020. beyond listing victims’ first names and initials, the site makes available the news and police reports from which the data are taken. it further draws on data compiled by fatal encounters, a nonprofit led by journalist and researcher d. brian burghart that is committed to gathering data on police-related deaths across the united states. finally, the section “projects” closes with just because we can doesn’t mean we should: on knowing and protecting data produced by the jewish consumptives’ relief society by jack maness and kim pham. this essay describes a recent project developed at the university of denver libraries, detailing how handwritten text recognition (htr) software was used to create transcriptions of records from the jewish consumptives’ relief society (jcrs), a tuberculosis sanatorium located in denver, colorado from 1904 to 1954. among a great many other potential uses, these typeand hand-written records give insight into the human experience of disease and epidemic (plus their treatment and effect on cultures), jewish immigration, and early life in the american west. the project aims to transform these transcripts into data that allows the text to be computationally analyzed, pursuant to a larger effort toward developing capacity in services and infrastructure, supporting digital humanities from a library framework, and contributing to the emerging htr ecosystem in archival work. it is essential to acknowledge that publishing these large datasets online, which contain the medical and personal histories of potentially vulnerable communities, does introduce serious ethical considerations. this paper both underscores the value of htr and frames the necessary ethical reflections on protecting data https://metalabharvard.github.io/projects/curatorial-aigents/aflittingatlas/ https://metalabharvard.github.io/projects/curatorial-aigents/aflittingatlas/ https://cyber.harvard.edu/story/2020-06/metalab-releases-their-names-visualization https://fatalencounters.org/ humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 6 derived from it. it suggests a terms-of-use intervention, perhaps valuable to similar projects, one that balances the needs of digital-scholar researchers with the care and respect of individuals, whose lives produced the very data now valuable to this scholarship. the 2022 issue of hsda henceforth closes with an ethical reflection that encompasses these various contributions. we are pleased to conclude ten years of activity for the journal, greeting readers who have followed us since 2011 with an in-depth study of the urgent ethical problems ahead in our uncertain — yet open — future. the blind spot of the future massimo lollini petrarch’s “original” of the fragmenta 1362-1558: from boccaccio to rovillio’s third printing humanist studies & the digital age, 1.1 (2011) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.1.1.1231 28 petrarch’s “original” of the fragmenta 1362-1558: from boccaccio to rovillio’s third printing h. wayne storey, editor-in-chief, textual cultures abstract: this essay questions the use of the term original to refer to petrarch’s partial holograph of the fragmenta (vaticano latino 3195) by examining the essential scribal change of register, from “fair” to “service” copy, that the poet imposed upon the still unsewn quires. especially for an author like petrarch, keen upon revising minute details of his lyrics and upon authorizing an “edition” of his own work, a fair copy produced by a professional copyist under his supervision was, as we see in much of latino 3195 and in professional copies of other works supervised by the poet, a key component of his “original.” examining four integrated critical and material approaches to petrarch’s work not only in the partial holograph but also in early codices and early printed editions, this study analyzes the utility of early fair copies in tracing the “original” of the fragmenta. it is appropriate that first we acknowledge a term that can get us into trouble: original. the definition might not be as simple as we think. moreover, how we understand the term original has a profound impact on how we consider a literary and cultural icon like petrarch’s rerum vulgarium fragmenta. since the early fifteenth century, original and its associated terms, among them “ipsa manu,” have been used both with striking historical and critical significance and with disconcerting abandonment of philological principles. might how we define original depend as well on the paleographical and codicological status of the copy declared to be original? especially in the context of professional writers, such as francesco da barberino and francesco petrarca, who depended upon professional copyists to render their authorial drafts into clean copies for circulation or personal use, can original also mean the fair copy sanctioned by the poet but in a professional copyist’s hand? can the original be a draft copy regardless of the status of (authorial) variants? indeed our definitions and uses of original have a profound impact on how we treat even other copies of the work. in the case of vaticano latino 3195, the manuscript’s status as a partial holograph supervised by petrarch has afforded it a privileged status, especially in establishing the definitive text of the fragmenta.1 the title of giovanni mestica’s 1896 edition pairs both the notion of “authority” of the partial holograph with the problematic methodological approach of textual recourse to the early manuscript tradition and early printed editions of the work: le rime di francesco petrarca restituite nell’ordine e nella lezione del testo originario sugli autografi col sussidio di altri codici e di stampe (“… restored to the order and reading of the original text according to the holographs with the aid of other manuscripts and printed books”). it will be, in fact, that phrase “col sussidio di http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ humanist studies & the digital age h. wayne storey 1.1 winter 2011 29 altri codici e stampe” (“with the aid of other manuscripts and printed books”) that will be— far too often—ignored by twentieth-century textual scholars. marco vattasso’s 1905 assessment of prominent manuscripts and their possible relationships to vaticano latino 3195 was essential for wilkins’ early studies in the 1920s.2 but vattasso’s arrival at the notion of “original” is not direct. vaticano latino 3195 is, as he explains, “partially in the hand of the poet, partly in that of a copyist, and completely revised and corrected by the poet” (vii). but, as vattasso immediately clarifies, the codex is not necessarily the first—or original version—of many of the poems, but rather the “the exemplar … in which [petrarch] collected the corrected versions of poems, which he continued to hone until the end of his life. thus the codex contains [the works’] final revisions and constitutes the expression of the poet’s final will. those poems excluded from this version should be considered either apocryphal or rejected; individual readings not present [in this codex] are either inauthentic or rejected by the author” (vii).3 in truth, authors, like copyists, make mistakes, and there are enough made in latino 3195—both by malpaghini and petrarch—that require an editor’s departure from the lectiones “approved” by the poet. moreover, authors, unlike copyists, tend to experiment in their draft and service copies, where—especially in the margins— much communication with copyists (and copies) occurs. traces of petrarch’s experiments, especially with the reordering of compositions, can be seen on the surface of the codex. but not all his experiments can be “final wishes.” recent research on vaticano latino 3195 for the 2004 facsimile establishes that the manuscript demonstrates significant changes in its status once petrarch abandons the idea of maintaining then still unsewn fascicles as a fair copy.4 numerous aspects of vaticano latino 3195 reveal a codex that sometime between 1370-1373 became a service copy in which the poet not only erased and emended wholecloth his text but also experimented with different orders for the last thirty-one poems (storey, “all’interno” 146-47). does then the manuscript’s changed status ultimately represent the poet’s definitive wishes? or is it simply the last extant incarnation of the work in the poet’s hand before his death in 1374? would later manuscripts have been made at the poet’s request that are reflected in copies produced even after the poet’s death? do features of vaticano latino 3195 that reveal a manuscript in fieri tell us that that codex is not “the original” or the only original? do those numbers in the margins of the last thirty-one poems give us the order with which petrarch was content to leave it? if so, why is there not one codex that reflects the changed order laid out in that renumbering? were subsequent readers and copyists oblivious to those numbers? and were the three-and-a-half blank but ruled chartae (cc. 49v-52v) designed not only to separate perhaps a part 1 from a part 2, as boccaccio’s early copy (vaticano chigiano l v 176, cc. 72r-73r) seems to suggest, but also to contain additional lyrics? in 2003 these and other questions caused maddalena signorini to ponder again, after vattasso in 1905, the possibility that an early (fifteenth-century) fair copy of the fragmenta, owned by coluccio salutati before its entry into cosimo de’ medici’s library, laurenziano 41.10, actually reflects “petrarch’s original” (133-54). but could this beautiful fair copy of the work be a “realization of the original”? the antegraph of laurenziano 41.10 does not apparently report, for example, petrarch’s changes in the ordering of the final thirty-one humanist studies & the digital age h. wayne storey 1.1 winter 2011 30 poems.5 nor is laurenziano 41.10 attentive to many of what we presume are petrarch’s erasures and marks to expunge letters for prosodic reasons. always philologically cautious in his assessments, gino belloni demonstrates that laurenziano 41.10 actually reproduces a stage in the development of latino 3195 before petrarch had completed all the erasures and revisions it now contains (“nota” 82). so its exemplar, or antegraph, might well be petrarch’s famous service copy, but it predates the macrotext’s actual final form in vaticano latino 3195. we must ask ourselves: what did petrarch’s “original” actually spawn? thanks to previous work by paolo sambin and to gino belloni’s essay in the 2004 commentary (see esp. 73-80) we know that petrarch’s partial holograph was first in the hands of his son-inlaw, francescuolo da brossano, and ultimately bound and in the library of family of tommasina savonarola and daniele santasofia in padova, where probably the redactor of the valdezoco edition and assuredly pietro bembo and alessandro vellutello at least had a look at the codex before producing their own editions of petrarch in, respectively, 1472, 1501, and 1525.6 philologically speaking, we are forced to say that especially in terms of the ordering of the microtexts in the fragmenta, it is very possible that the most feasible “original” lies somewhere among several codices produced as fair copies, potentially by professional copyists, as a composite archetype of a vulgata tradition even if the author’s final and definitive wishes for the text are expressed in vaticano latino 3195. until recently, the textual authority of that vulgate tradition has been set aside in favor of what we can now identify as the service copy (vaticano latino 3195) partially in the author’s hand. in fact, as we shall see, this claim to authenticity guaranteed by the author’s hand, the “original,” does not begin with aldo manuzio’s postscript to his readers in 1501 nor with giovanni mestica’s discovery of petrarch’s experimental renumbering of compositions 337-365 in the margins of 3195’s chartae 66v-71r. we cannot date with any degree of accuracy petrarch’s addition of the insert of the four chartae (or the binion that would become cc. 67-70). the use of scribal renumbering to reorder compositions in a subsequent copy was not only common before petrarch but applied even in the case of the best witness of the so-called malatesta copy of the fragmenta, laurenziano 41.17, which promised addenda of poems on single sheets (“in papyro”) to be inserted to complete the fair copy that accompanied petrarch’s letter varia 9 to pandolfo malatesta.7 what we don’t know is how much petrarch experimented with the final reordering of these poems up until the time of his death nor can we assert with absolute certainty that the reordering that we see in the marginal numbers from 1 to 31 is final. we take it on faith that this renumbering on the last chartae of the manuscript in petrarch’s hand represents his final intention. it is—i repeat—an intention that was never fully realized in any extant copy we have until mestica’s 1896 edition. the large number of fifteenth-century codices that simply replicate the physical order of the poems leads me to believe that petrarch’s final experiment in the last thirty-one poems with marginal numbers was relatively late and well after the release of other manuscripts based on unrevised addenda. humanist studies & the digital age h. wayne storey 1.1 winter 2011 31 consequently, to trace the late fourteenthand fifteenth-century manuscript tradition is something of an exercise in controlled chaos in as much as the order of some sections of the fragmenta is concerned. some manuscripts certainly underwent contaminations of diverse stages of petrarch’s emendations and changes. wilkins’ results in the making of the canzoniere provide raw evidence of the cross-fertilization of manuscripts in which scribes seem to have resorted to multiple copies of the fragmenta, as well as other poetic collections by petrarch and trecento poets to assemble their copies.8 however, textual variants tell us a different story. the individual microtexts demonstrate remarkably stable texts. the problem is petrarch’s seemingly endless penchant for emendation and experimentation. even before abandoning the idea of a fair copy, the poet often intervened to erase (scrape) and revise and revise again, sometimes entire poems. once petrarch converts the manuscript from a fair to a service copy, this process of scraping and revising increases substantially. in light of the large number of copies made of the fragmenta at several of its various stages of evolution, boccaccio’s being the first (chigiano l v 176), copies—and copies of these copies—were made in which subsequent petrarchan emendations made in vat. lat. 3195 were not recorded. if this state of textual affairs seems somewhat mind-boggling that’s because it is. perfectly competent paleographers and philologists have made claims that have been undone by the revelation of a microscopic detail in the target codex. and sometimes we simply never know whether the error rests with petrarch or the copyist transcribing him. * * * * * in every case up through the early printed editions, we can, however, rely on several features of the target codex or book to help us evaluate the macrotexts and the individual microtexts of the fragmenta. seldom is one feature determinative in sorting out whether the copyist had access to petrarch’s service copy or a reliable fair copy made from that service copy. the first was the basis of wilkins’ monumental study: the ordering of the individual poems. in the last few years the growing philological view of wilkins’ method based on conjecture and probability has been relatively negative, especially with regard to the fact that the american scholar never actually studied directly many of the manuscripts he discusses in detail, including the colors of ink he interprets to reflect work intervals in the preparation of vaticano latino 3195.9 to my mind, the most controversial and yet the most widely accepted result of his work on the order of the poems has been the division of numerous manuscripts into family groups according to the order of the compositions. petrarch’s penchant for experimenting with and altering the order makes this category a useful tool when used with other characteristics, especially the problems posed by crossfertilization of codices. but the difficult task of dating the periods in which certain orderings were definitively effected by the poet limits its use as an effective tool.10 probably in mid-1368, petrarch had the partial holograph vaticano latino 3195, still destined to be a fair copy, sent to milano to be rubricated. while i will not speculate here about petrarch’s intentions, i will point out: a) that it was unusual for partially completed codices to be rubricated, and b) that the poet’s (and now copyist’s) uncertainty about the humanist studies & the digital age h. wayne storey 1.1 winter 2011 32 finality of the manuscript’s texts would become at least partially emblematic of the textual condition of the early manuscript tradition. not even the rubricated poems in latino 3195, such as the previous rvf 121 (“donna mi vene spesso ne la mente”) would be secure against petrarch’s revisionist pen-knife (storey, transcription 366-77). consequently, it is easy for us to understand the condition of the fragmenta’s early tradition. many fourteenthand fifteenth-century manuscripts of the work demonstrate clearly that a first hand had only a partial antegraph at his disposal, often—as in the cases of laurenziano 41.17 and queriniano d ii 21—ending with the final canzone “vergine bella” (rvf 366) but were missing poems added subsequently by copyists both to what we today refer to as parts 1 and 2. while these addenda were eventually incorporated in various ways, it is useful to remember petrarch’s own formulation in his letter to pandolfo malatesta (varia 9), which we have already touched upon. petrarch’s instruction to his copyist to leave for each of the parts “in fine bona spatia” in the copy of the fragmenta he has sent to pandolfo signals what he might well have considered his best material strategy for adding poems to the fair copy of an established corpus of lyrics already in the possession of select readers. this might well have meant that malatesta’s copyist would have had to adopt a system for reordering the poems similar to those we see in latino 3195 or escorial e.iii.23 as he transferred poems from the loose sheets of addenda onto the blank chartae at the end of the two parts. as we know, petrarch resorted to the simple insertion of bifolia among the still loose gatherings of his service collection to achieve the basis for reordering in poems 337-365 precisely because his copy was not bound (storey, transcription 380-88). in truth, in codices such as laurenziano 41.17 and queriniano d ii 21 the actual order of the poems is perhaps less important than the reconstruction of the material forms of the addenda themselves and their material relationships with petrarch’s inserts into his own service copy. in laurenziano 41.17 the copyist resorts to a system of letters and numbers for poems transcribed after the concluding canzone “vergine bella” (c. 64r-65r), which itself carries the rubric “in fine libri pon” (storey and capelli, “modalità di ordinamento” 17786). the second, third, and fourth hands of the late-fourteenth-century queriniano d ii 21 relied on the addition of extra bifolia to insert additional poems, mostly before the final canzone “vergina bella” (rvf 366). notably, however, in both codices the block of sonnets from “il mal mi preme” to “arbor victoriosa” (rvf 244-263) are added by a subsequent hand. these same sonnets are contained on cc. 47r49r of the partial holograph and must have been collected separately on two bifolia. even more noteworthy in the queriniano manuscript is the sequence of poems and the quality of the readings for the final compositions. it is helpful to visualize petrarch’s holograph before the insertion of the binion to remember that c. 66v once faced c. 71r and their sequence of poems was: 66v: vidi fra mille donne una gia tale (335) tornami a mente ançi ue dentro quella (336) questo nostro caduco et fragil bene (337 [re350]) o tempo o ciel uolubil che fuggendo (338 [re355]) 71r: dolci dureçce et placide repulse (362 [re351]) spirto felice che si dolcemente (363 [re352]) humanist studies & the digital age h. wayne storey 1.1 winter 2011 33 de porgi mano alaffannato ingegno (364 [re354]) vago augelletto che cantando vai (365 [re353]) between “tornami a mente” (rvf 336) and “vergine bella” (rvf 366) are remnants that demonstrate one of the few copies of a partially revised numbering that petrarch wrote in the margins of his service copy. immediately after “tornami a mente” (336) we find on the same charta (46v) not, according to the physical sequence of the manuscript, the sonnet “questo nostro caduco et fragil bene” but the reordered 337 “quel che d’odore et di color vincea” (rvf 339). the sequence on c. 47 recto and verso suggests that the copyist had at his disposal the first page of a slightly reordered form of petrarch’s final insert (c. 67r-v) plus the unrevised contents of c. 71 of petrarch’s holograph. petrarch’s experiment of redistributing “questo nostro caduco” (337) and “o tempo o ciel volubil” (338) among the poems of the insert is already in place: queriniano d ii 21: c. 46v tornami a mente [c. 66v1] quel che dodore et di color vincea [petrarch’s insert c. 67r1] c. 47r lasciatai morte sença sole il mondo [petrarch’s insert c. 67r2] conobbi quantol ciel li occhi maprese [petrarch’s insert c. 67r3] del cibo ondel signor mio sempre abonda [petrarch’s insert c. 67v2] dolce mio caro et pretioso pegno [petrarch’s insert c. 67r4] questo nostro caduco e fragil bene [c. 66v3] dolci dureççe et placide repulse [c. 71r1] c. 47v spirto felice che si dolcemente [c. 71r2] de porgi mano alaffannato ingegno [c. 71r3] vago augelletto che cantando vai [c. 71r4] o tempo o ciel uolubil che fuggendo [c. 66r4] nor can we discount a remarkable feature when we consider this process of establishing the order of the poems in this early tradition: the editorial skills of the copyist. as we have already mentioned in another context, after the final poem of part 1, “arbor victoriosa triumphale” (263) on c. 34r of queriniano d ii 21, the copyist inserts one of petrarch’s sonnets not normally included in the fragmenta: “per utile per dilecto e per honore” (14a in paolino, rime 708-11).11 wilkins notes only its inclusion but does not consider the scribal culture at work in the addendum nor its contents (making). “per utile, per dilecto” is not, however, a casual insertion on the charta to fill space. it is a sonnet about the nature of carnal love and passion (“carnale amor non tiene in sé drittura” [v. 9]) under whose influence petrarch states he has been not one but twenty-two years (“non dico un sol, ma più di ventidui” [v. 15]). the copyist has added an anniversary poem that establishes, now as the last poem of part 1, an additional contrast to the content and tone of part 2. * * * * * the second kind of analytical tool we have at our disposal fuses petrarch the copyist with petrarch the poet in the consistent transcriptional forms that he used to develop his humanist studies & the digital age h. wayne storey 1.1 winter 2011 34 poetics not only in the partial holograph but for most of his career, that is from the earliest extant holograph transcriptions of sonnets such as “per mirar policleto a prova fiso” and “quando giunse a simon l’altro concetto” on c. 7r of vaticano latino 3196. less of a professional copyist than boccaccio, petrarch was nevertheless a grafomane. continually engaged in writing and copying, for petrarch the act of writing itself was the foundation of an intellectual ideology.12 in his fragmenta, there is a strict correlation among the poem’s meaning, the copyist’s strict transcriptional formulae for its genre, and the poem’s intricate role in the macrotext.13 for example, though the sestina is part of the canzone family, petrarch distinguished it definitively as a separate genre with characteristics unique from his canzoni. his sonnets were always written on the same seven lines, two verses per line. this was not to save parchment; it was an essential part of the genre’s ideological formation that contributed to the poem’s significance. in the late fourteenth century the copyist of riccardiano 1088 interrupts his own copy with two maniculae to complain about petrarch’s difficult two-column layout with changing reading strategies (see fig. 1 [27r]). he simultaneously warns his reader of the new copy style he will use and surrenders to his culture’s standardizing formulae for poetic genres. thus when we see a manuscript with petrarch’s transcriptional forms for the five genres in the fragmenta, we are closer to a rigorous copyist who is more attentive to the petrarchan copy than to the transcriptional formulae of his own culture. figure 1: riccardiano 1088, c. 27r (detail) both laurenziano 41.17 and queriniano d ii 21 reflect our second determinative humanist studies & the digital age h. wayne storey 1.1 winter 2011 35 category: petrarch’s standardized formulae for the transcription of the five poetic genres of the fragmenta. these strict forms are applicable not only to the individual genres of the sonnet, the sestina, the subgenres of the canzone, the ballata, and the madrigale, but to the actual charta itself, creating two integrated levels of visual poetics within the codex: within the individual composition and on the charta as a unit. historically speaking the fifteenth century’s rapid abandonment of this dimension of petrarch’s transcriptional poetics significantly ushers in the final conversion of those original poetics in 1470 and 1472, in the princeps printed by johann de speyer, and in valdezoco’s 1472 paduan edition. with the standardization of what i call “petrarch’s book in the vernacular,” typified by laurenziano 41.14, the poetics of the page have been reduced to two sonnets per charta and petrarch’s transcriptional poetics lost. on the other hand, most of the fourteenth-century copies and even some early fifteenth-century codices, such as laurenziano pluteo 41.10 and laurenziano segniano 1, attempt to follow carefully petrarch’s layouts for the genres. but petrarch’s “poetics of the page” were difficult for copyists precisely because it was based on a strict 31-line-per-charta writing space that depended on an exact writing style. as we know, two of the basic features of petrarch’s “poetics of the charta” were: a) the grouping of four complete sonnets per side of each charta (see fig. 2), and b) the placement on the same charta of a sonnet and a sestina (see fig. 3), designed especially to draw into sharp contrast the different reading strategies of the two genres and their very different relationships of content to form (storey, transcription 225-60). figure 2: vaticano latino 3195, c. 1v humanist studies & the digital age h. wayne storey 1.1 winter 2011 36 figure 3: vaticano latino 3195, c. 7v the dynamic sonnet, read horizontally across the charta from column to column, was balanced on seven transcriptional lines; the static sestina, read down the column, was always written in two columns of uneven length. copyists who tried to follow charta-bycharta petrarch’s formulae were restricted to the same number of transcriptional lines per charta: thirty-one. the copyist of morgan m 502, probably produced in the veneto in the early 1380s, is one of the best examples of the format at work and, ultimately, in failure because he tends to use thirty-two transcriptional lines for each charta. but he has his successes as well, especially in his adherence to petrarch’s mathematical combinations of hendecasyllables and settenari per line in diverse categories of canzoni such as “lasso me, ch’i’ non so in qual parte pieghi” (rvf 70), “s’i’ ’l dissi mai” (rvf 206), and “tacer non posso” (rvf 325) as well as in the formulae for the other four genres (storey, “all’interno” 160-71). the copyist of the morgan codex is so accurate that we have to turn to his copy of canz. 356 [re360], “quel’ antiquo mio dolce empio signore” (cc. 61v-62v), to understand petrarch’s form, compromised in the insert by the limitations of space in the binion.14 * * * * * the third category of distinguishing features is constituted by microscopic variants by which we can trace particular readings back to a given moment before petrarch revised a letter or word here or part of a verse there. many “characteristic readings” reveal those humanist studies & the digital age h. wayne storey 1.1 winter 2011 37 places in the partial holograph that can potentially tell us what subsequent copyists have and have not seen, especially from what stage of petrarch’s revisions their antegraphs were copied. with careful and usually microscopic analyses they can supply us with readings that are either corrupt or no longer visible in the partial holograph. this is an operation that has not been foremost among the approaches to petrarch’s fragmenta since there has been little interest in the collation of individual witnesses in light of the partial holograph’s seeming authority in establishing the text of the work. this kind of close study both of variants and forms of manuscripts such as morgan m. 502, queriniano d ii 21, and segniano 1, requires as well careful attention to the microscopic details of the partial holograph, the minimalia—as i called them elsewhere—or, according to gino belloni, the “caratteristiche” of latino 3195 that serve as pivotal guides to tracing in earlier and later fair copies the origins of unique readings altered by petrarch.15 the three categories of belloni’s and my own combined approaches to these unique indicators are: 1) prosody, what belloni calls the “ipometrie grafiche” in some cases corrected by a single expunction point, or period, under the extra vowel; 2) errors, defects, or difficult readings in the manuscript; and 3) unique material features in the execution of pivotal codices, such as the partial holograph, boccaccio’s chigiano l v 176, or petrarch’s holograph latino 3196. given the multiple levels of manuscript production and subsequent interventions by readers and owners of codices, all three categories represent potential areas of codicological and paleographic interpretation. belloni’s first entry in tavola 2 (103), “que’ ch’infinita” (rvf 4) is an excellent example of how a material issue of production and the interpretation of hands and inks in the partial holograph can be at odds with the tradition. belloni notes, along with modigliani and storey, that the l of “qvel” on c. 1r (rvf 4) is in a different hand from that of malpaghini, the copyist of this section, or petrarch.16 upon closer scrutiny, in 2004 i noted in print that under the canceled l is another l, malpaghini’s l attached to the ascending tick mark typical of malpaghini’s and petrarch’s e (“edizione diplomatica” 388). the particular ink, a reddish brown, used to intervene in this case is found in other sections of the codex as well (388) and could well represent the hand of a later corrector, who traced malpaghini’s l, attaching an atypical horizontal pes, or foot, that extends to the right. the corrector subsequently puts an expunction point under the l. belloni reads the l and “quel” as a variant, but deems it of little use as a “characteristic” that would link another copy to the partial holograph as a antegraph. but the preponderant weight of the manuscript tradition favors by far the form que. savoca, for example, opts for “quel” not only against the early tradition but also the inherited wisdom of editions from bembo (1501) to bettarini (2005).17 in 2008, savoca follows my suggestion (2004) of malpaghini’s l, but declares it “probabilmente aggiunta da petrarca in sede di revisione, perché poi malpaghini la mettesse al suo posto, come in seguito fece, dimenticando però di eradere il segno in basso (un punto che assomiglia a una macchiolina irregolare)” (6-7). here savoca embarks upon conjectures—telling us, like wilkins, what petrarch probably did and what malpaghini forgot—that only obfuscate a true material and textual problem that the partial holograph does not seem able to resolve.18 already in 1896, mestica, who saw the added l in an “inchiostro violaceo” (a color of ink never used by petrarch in his holographs [74]), humanist studies & the digital age h. wayne storey 1.1 winter 2011 38 suggested turning to the early fifteenth-century fair copy laurenziano 41.10 to solve the uncertainty of the holograph. but we also have an earlier copy of the sonnet made by a reliable scribe, giovanni boccaccio, directly from a petrarchan copy of the fragmentorum liber (chigiano l v 176), in which we find the reading “que ch’infinita prouedença et arte” (c. 43v), an incipit that proves to be stable both before the final redaction of the fragmenta and in the treand quattrocento manuscript traditions. in truth, in the face of the partial holograph’s corruption, a dependable textual tradition of fair copies actually reveals the complex layers of production instilled in the author’s own fair-turned-service copy that has undergone uncertain interventions. obviously one of the problems with this method of analysis rests in the verification of authentic hands in the partial holograph. and the truth is that even with my own close study, for example, of how erasures were indicated by petrarch and then executed, we still don’t have a fail-proof way of knowing who actually erased letters.19 in most cases in vaticano latino 3195 we can presume that the erasure is executed by the poet or under the poet’s supervision. but some examples leave us in doubt. the next sample led to recent criticism of my work, so i am happy to have the occasion to reiterate my own findings. on c. 44v of petrarch’s holograph, v. 5 of “amor co la man dextra il lato mano” (rvf 228) reads: “voncer di penna / con sospir del fianco”: the first minum after the two of the n is curved top and bottom to the right (see fig. 4). figure 4: vaticano latino 3195, c. 44v (detail) i confess that i could not see signs of erasure that modigliani identified in 1904, but there is evidence that letters have been retraced. this calls into question also the strike-through of humanist studies & the digital age h. wayne storey 1.1 winter 2011 39 the titulus over the e of “pena” that cancels the first n and signals a change from “penna” to “pena” in v. 5. the weight of the interpretative tradition (“vomer di penna”) rests on any philologist—even the non-italian philologist—who examines the passage, which guido bezzola identified as a strained prosecution of the allegory of the “pen as plow” (401). from the copyist of laurenziano 41.17, who serves as witness to one of the earliest releases of the poem, the often definitive morgan m 502, and bembo’s 1501 edition, to rovillio (1558), muratori (1711), carducci-ferrari (1899), and even mestica (1896) read “vomer di penna” in v. 7.20 rosanna bettarini cites modigliani and contini as origins of the revised reading “vomer di pena” based on the poet’s own elimination of the titulus over the e. but there are others who report seeing something different in this untidy textual space. it is impossible to know who turned “vomer” into “voncer”; it is a passage that has clearly been corrupted by a later hand. but we can date the change between 1374 and the publication of the valdezoco edition of 1472, which reads from the holograph: “voncer di penna” (c. 95v; see fig. 5). trust me; this is no conspiracy between me and the redactor of the 1472 edition. yet just a few years before, in 1463, the copyist of laurenziano 41.14, who seems to have access to a copy privileged by the poet, notes in the margin of c. 114v the variant “pena” to the text’s “penna” for v. 5.21 figure 5: valdezoco ed. of 1472, c 95v (detail) * * * * * we must note that our fourth and final classification is the one that is perhaps most tied to the general confusion surrounding a “final form” of the fragmenta even right after humanist studies & the digital age h. wayne storey 1.1 winter 2011 40 petrarch’s death and up through the eighteenth century: the claim of editorial authenticity based on the poet’s personal copy, the “original.” it is an odd and somewhat unique category into which petrarch’s fragmenta and triumphi often fall. (we seldom see such insistence in the case of antonio pucci’s manuscripts or even of boccaccio’s, even though both authors left a significant number of holograph copies.) not only did aldo manuzio proclaim bembo’s access to petrarch’s personal copies as the foundation for his 1501 edition, in 1525 and 1528 alessandro vellutello denied that same authenticity to justify his biographical reordering of most of the poems and leaves no doubt that he has seen the manuscript that today we know as vaticano latino 3195. but the practice began long before these two fierce competitors of the venetian book trade. among the earliest copies we have of the fragmenta, we find in the very title of the codex the claim that the exemplar has been taken from an antegraph that is the poet’s own copy in his own hand. this rubric is a double-edged sword. there is little doubt it was to aldo manuzio’s economic advantage to make such a claim, but the truth is that bembo’s suspicions were driven by a rapid check of the partial holograph after most of his copytext for the 1501 edition (today vaticano latino 3197) had already been completed on the basis of two other manuscripts.22 some fourteenth and fifteenth-century copyists engaged in similar declarations of authenticity to advance the quality of their transcriptions. but about the time we become dismissive of the authenticating phrase as a rhetorical device, we discover that there is—as we shall see—a significant grain of truth in the phase included in the title “scripto ipsa manu” (“written by his own hand”) in the early fourteenth-century laurenziano segniano 1. the copyist of the fifteenth-century vaticano reginense 1110 states in a rubric on c. 107v, right before the beginning of the canzone “i’ vo pensando” (rvf 264): “que sequuntur post mortem domine lauree scripta sunt. ita enim proprio codice domini francisci annotatum est, et carte quatuor pretermisse vacue” (“those [poems] that follow the death of laura are written here. thus it is noted in master francesco’s own copy and he left four blank chartae”). virtually the same eye-witness report of the blank but ruled chartae left in petrarch’s partial holograph, cc. 49v-52v, is found also in beinecke m 706 (c.107r) and supported by a colophon from verona in 1393 (c. 186r). but, as dario del puppo has noted, the script betrays the actual age of the copy (“shaping interpretations,” esp. 108-20). beinecke 706 was made in the late fifteenth century, but the colophon and the rubrics are copied from a much earlier codex. here again our method turns to minimalia for help in clarifying this important rubric in petrarchan manuscripts. the laurentian codex segniano 1 is an unassuming paper codex probably produced in the 1420s or ’30s. it had caught vattasso’s eye in his 1905 introduction to the photographic edition. but its incomplete state left it of little use to wilkins and others whose interests lay in the wholecloth order of the microtexts to establish families of witnesses. the manuscript was known to me as one of the few fifteenth-century codices that maintains petrarch’s transcriptional formulae. its copyist uses generally a 31line transcriptional field, respecting the construction of the single charta in petrarch’s partial holograph. the manuscript’s sole copyist is unusually accurate, even engaging in a form of hyper-correction in his transcription of the fragmenta’s sestine with the same humanist studies & the digital age h. wayne storey 1.1 winter 2011 41 general horizontal layout of the verses that we find in use for the other genres in the partial holograph. i did not at first realize how accurate the copyist of segniano 1 actually was. one detail to which some paleographers pay little attention is medieval scribes’ use of capital letters, majuscules, except at the beginnings of transcriptional lines and verses. proper names and even nomina sacra are hardly ever capitalized in medieval manuscripts. but preparing my diplomatic-interpretative edition of the fragmenta i elected to indicate malpaghini’s and petrarch’s use of majuscules whether they correspond to modern usage or not. petrarch and, on a few occasions, malpaghini had the unusual, but erratic, habit of capitalizing the initial letter in mid-verse, usually after the verse’s caesura. precisely because this practice is erratic it is unique to petrarch’s service copy. segniano 1 maintains all the numerous instances of these unique majuscules, a feature that it shares with no other manuscript that i have been able to find.23 in vv. 10-12 of the sonnet “tra quantunque leggiadre donne et belle” (rvf 218 [latino 3195: c. 43r]), petrarch punctuates the minor pause after venti (.) and then capitalizes in midverse the a of “a la terra”: a laere i venti. a la terra herbe et fronde. aluomo et lintelecto et le parole. et almar ritollesse i pesci et londe. in the final quire of the autograph codex, petrarch punctuates the pause in exactly the same way in v. 50 of “quando il soave mio fido conforto” (rvf 355; revised as 359, c. 69r) and capitalizes the i of “il” after the medial pause (.) in the verse “vinsi il mondo et me stessa. il lauro segna”; in segniano 1 this verse appears as: vinsi il mondo / et me stessa. in lauro segna in v. 4 of the ballata “amor quando fioria” (rvf 324) on c. 50r of segniano 1 (c. 43r), we find the same majuscule a after the short pause after “morte” that we find in the partial holograph: ai dispietata morte / ai crudel vita. luna ma posto in doglia and in v. 12 of “quel vago, dolce, caro, honesto sguardo” (rvf 330) on c. 65r of latino 3195 petrarch adopts the majuscule a after the medial pause (“il ciel naspetta. a uoi parra per tempo”), a graphological nuance taken up by the copyist of segniano 1: figure 6: laur. segniano 1, c.48v we can determine additionally that segniano 1’s contact with petrarch’s service copy predated two emendations signaled by belloni (“nota”). malpaghini’s original transcription humanist studies & the digital age h. wayne storey 1.1 winter 2011 42 of v. 44 of “o aspectata in ciel beata e bella” (rvf 28) reads: “qua figli mai qual donne” (cf. bettarini 142). petrarch later emends the verse by erasing the l of “qual” to the form we know today: “qua’ figli mai, qua’ donne” (cf. savoca 43). but segniano 1, c. 6r, like laurenziano 41.10, still has the older form: figure 7: laur. segniano 1, c. 6r “qua figli mai qual donne” (cf., however, boccaccio’s transcription in chigiano l v 176, c. 47v: “quai figli mai quai donne”). and again on c. 16r, segniano 1 registers the reading of v. 21 of “perché la vita è breve” (71): “non che laguagli altrui parlar, o mio” before the erasure of the g and its insertion marker on c. 15v of the poet’s partial holograph. figure 8: laur. segniano 1, c. 16r these and other minimalia seem to confirm that the copyist of segniano 1 worked either directly from the service copy at a stage of its preparation when petrarch had become its sole copyist but before its final emendations or from a very carefully prepared antegraph. we have every reason to believe the copyist’s rubric: “francisci petrarce laureati poete … scripto ipsa manu decti poete” (c. 1r). if segniano 1 marks a distinctive height of accuracy in the copying of petrarch’s fragmenta, the slightly later laurenziano 41.14 supplies us with two other milestones in the history of the diffusion of petrarch’s service copy. dated reliably in its colophon to 1463, this paper codex supplies the model for what i call the “new vernacular petrarch edition.” its apparatus begins with a translation into italian of aretino’s “life of petrarch” and petrarch’s own “laura propriis virtutibus illustris”—by then a standard in most petrarch manuscripts—followed by its translation into italian, and an alphabetical table of the poems. this introductory apparatus is followed by the fragmenta and the triumphi. gone are the graphetic features of petrarch’s transcriptional poetics, replaced by a system of two sonnets per page. we are still thirteen years away from francesco filelfo’s partial humanist studies & the digital age h. wayne storey 1.1 winter 2011 43 commentary, first printed in bologna, and twenty-one years away from the first complete commentary finished by girolamo squarciafico in 1484. nevertheless we are fully within the model of the vernacular edition whose formula dates back to the early italian manuscripts of occitan verse, especially the early fourteenth-century tuscan laurenziano 41.42 with its vidas and trilingual glossaries. laurenziano 41.14 represents the apogee of the petrarchan apparatus upon which much of the sixteenth-century printed tradition will be constructed. moreover, it is a manuscript that is famous for its authorial variants of the triumphi listed in the margins and countersigned by the letters “d.ma.d.p.” (and “d.p.”): “di mano del poeta.” the title of the fragmenta does not lay claim to such an authorial antegraph, but the text itself does bear witness to both text and marginal corrections that suggest at least a collation of either petrarch’s service copy or an early fair copy. thus by the second half of the fifteenth century, both in manuscript and in print we have two models for constructing a book of vernacular petrarch: 1) the text with sparse or no apparatus that boasted its authenticity and connection to the poet, from valdezoco’s 1472 paduan edition to the aldine editions of 1501 and 1514; and 2) editions which offered the user an ever greater interpretative apparatus, from the bolognese filelfo commentary tradition of the late fifteenth century to the heavily annotated apparatuses of vellutello in 1525 and guglielmo rovillo’s lyonese editions of the 1550s. just two short years after bembo’s 1501 aldine edition we see an explosion of editions with multiple commentaries (filelfo’s, antonio da tempo’s, girolamo squarciafico’s) in which the text, especially of canzoni, is practically lost under the weight of commentary that isolates stanzas and separates with ever greater distance the space between the work’s microtexts. this is particularly the case with angelo scinzenzeler’s 1507 milanese edition (petrarca con doi commenti sopra li soneti et canzone, which included nicolò peranzone’s commentary to the triumphi, and bernardo stagnino’s 1522 venetian petrarcha con doi commenti sopra li sonetti et canzone). the ideal but imperfect diary of petrarch’s fragmenta becomes— especially in vellutello and thus for the early french petrarchists as well—the poet’s biography that guides us through interpretation. there is no greater contrast than between, on the one hand, vellutello’s 1525 venetian volgari opere del petrarcha—with its table of sonnets and canzoni, its fold-out map, the commentator’s preface, his treatise on the order of the poems, his essay on the life and customs of the poet, and his biography of “madonna laura with a description of vauclus and of the place where the poet first fell in love with her” before the text of his part 1 and extensive commentary begins—and, on the other hand, melchiore sessa’s 1526 edition of li sonetti, canzoni et triomphi di messer francesco petrarcha historiati, which is essentially a reprinting of bembo’s unannotated 1514 aldine edition with its significant shift in the beginning of the “sonetti et canzoni di messer francesco petrarcha in morte di madonna laura” and a concluding table of sonnets and canzoni. the brief and anonymous “a gli lettori” does anything other than create a history (“historiare”) from the poems. rather its appeal is to the reader: “he who doesn’t see in [petrarch’s] very lovely verses that he loved so very intensely” (“chi non vede ne suoi leggiadrissimi versi lui tanto caldamente havere amato”) (c. 1v; signature a iv). humanist studies & the digital age h. wayne storey 1.1 winter 2011 44 by the time we reach the 1558 third printing in lyon of guglielmo rovillio’s petrarca we find a fusion of bembo’s second edition with the extensive realization of a key element in vellutello’s 1528 title: utility. the apparatus of rovillio’s edition contains annotations for each poem from bembo’s prose, a short life of petrarch and a description of the birth of laura, benedetto varchi’s sonnet for petrarch’s tomb, and françois i’s epitaph for laura’s tomb. but the utility announced in the title of rovillio’s edition takes us a step further: tools for those who want to write poetry like petrarch’s. after the triumphi, rovillio inserted in unnumbered pages a table of rhyme endings in the fragmenta; he then added with a new pagination and a title page for luc’antonio ridolfi’s table and guide for centoni, or poetic imitations. by 1558 questions of authenticity have given way to issues of imitability, which means that petrarch’s poetry and poetics must in truth conform to late sixteenthand seventeenth-century standards. alessandro tassoni will insist that he hears the french loreta, rather than laureta, among the verses of “quand’io movo i sospiri a chiamar voi” (rvf 5), and added to the sonnet’s new poetics we find from then until today another innovation never contemplated by petrarch: the capitalization and highlighting of “lau-reta” in verses 3, 5, and 7 (cf. petrarch’s version of the poem in figure 2). but this is a story of a new petrarch that i leave to others. 1 the identification of the codex as belonging to petrarch’s hand was pivotal to the authority of the aldine edition (cose volgari di messer francesco petrarca [1501]) purportedly based on petrarch’s own manuscript, and to vellutello’s counterclaims of its “original status” in 1525 (le volgari opere del petrarcha con la esposizione di alessandro vellutello da lucca) as a basis for his reordering of the poems. see storey, “economies of authority” and storey, review of savoca, codicologia ed ecdotica and rerum vulgarium fragmenta. note that throughout this essay abbreviations in diplomatic transcriptions are expanded in italics rather than in parentheses. 2 see vattasso, “introduzione,” vii-xxxvii. ernest hatch wilkins’ studies, published as individual essays, were assembled and revised in the making of the canzoniere and other petrarchan studies. wilkins’ conjectures regarding early versions of petrarch’s canzoniere posited forms of the macrotext, rather than variants within the microtexts, working backwards from the state of the last draft available to us, vaticano latino 3195, toward the first draft copy, vaticano latino 3196. 3 the draft manuscript vaticano latino 3196 contains numerous marginal notations by petrarch himself that vattasso believed attest to another manuscript in which poems were ordered as a macrotext, signaled by the pre-1357 annotations of “transcriptum in ordine” (1905, xvi-xvii). 4 see zamponi, “il libro del canzoniere: modelli, strutture, funzioni,” 13-72 and storey, “all’interno della poetica grafico-visiva di petrarca,” 131-71. 5 the codex follows the physical ordering of the 366 poems rather than the revised order renumbered in vat. lat. 3195. humanist studies & the digital age h. wayne storey 1.1 winter 2011 45 6 the reference is, of course, to the landmark editions of bortolamio valdezoco, francesco petrarca in 1472; pietro bembo, cose volgari in 1501; and alessandro vellutello, volgari opere in 1525. vellutello’s discussion of the “codex bound in white leather” in his introductory remarks, “trattato de l’ordine de son. et canz. del pet. mutato,” to the 1525 and 1528 editions makes it clear that he saw and discussed the manuscript with pietro bembo, but arrived at conclusions that are very different from those of the publisher of bembo’s 1501 edition, aldo il romano (see storey, “economies of authority”). 7 on the scribal use of marginal markers to reorder compositions in a manuscript, see storey and capelli, “modalità,” 169-86; and in specific reference to the workshop copy ms escorial e.iii.23, that contains two orderings of stilnovist poems produced by an elaborate system of markers, see capelli, “nuove indagini sulla raccolta di rime italiane del ms. escorial e.iii.23,” 73-113. on the origins of the “malatesta” family of copies of the fragmenta and petrarch’s letter, see petrarch’s varia 9, later redacted by petrarch as senilis xiii 11, to pandolfo malatesta (dated 4 january 1372). petrarch regrets the poor quality of the binding of the copy of his vernacular poems (“[n]ugellas meas vulgares”) that has been sent to pandolfo. it is the postscriptum of varia 9 (“sunt apud me … nihilominus in papyro”) that describes how petrarch has had the copyist leave a good amount of blank space at the end of the two parts so that poems that he sends later, as he sorts through them, can be added: “ideoque mandavi quod utriusque in fine bona spatia linquerentur: et si quidquam occurret, mittam tibi reclusum nihilominus in papyro” (cited from fracassetti, francisci petrarcae, vol. 3, 323). see also storey, “petrarch’s concepts of text and textual reform,” 201-24. 8 two brief examples will have to suffice. the first comes from the multiple placements of the madrigal “or vedi amor” that replaces the ballata “donna mi vene spesso ne la mente” at position 121 in many manuscripts, yet is also found in otherwise authoritative codices, such as morgan m. 502, in positions relatively near to 121. the other examples come from the fifteenth-century codices queriniano d ii 21 and riccardiano 1088. in the first manuscript, a second copyist selects a sonnet from petrarch’s disperse, or unordered sonnets, “per utile, per dilecto, e per honore” (c. 36r), to complete part 1 (= 263bis). but in the riccardiano manuscript, the primary copyist transcribes the popular sonnet “alessandro lasciò la signoria” immediately after “arbor victoriosa tiumphale” (rvf 263) to fill the charta’s right column and to conclude part 1. notably the same copyist will recycle the same sonnet, but with distinct variants later in the same codex, and attribute it to dante (see storey, “il codice pierpont morgan m. 502,” 487-504 and storey, “the illusion of authentic philology.” 9 see del puppo and storey, 495-512; zamponi, 13-16; barolini, 21-44; and, most recently, pulsoni, 257-68. 10 certainly wilkins’ tendency to “narrativize” a history of production was informed by his profound knowledge of the poet’s works. but his reliance on probability, conjecture, an indirect knowledge of the material tradition, and what we might call a cultural inclination to impose artificial scientific systems, such as his creation of three categories of intervals between the periods of work petrarch devoted to the assembly of vaticano latino 3195, render his results in some cases unreliable. 11 on queriniano d ii 21 and this sonnet, see gaffuri, 75-91. 12 see armando petrucci’s pages on petrarch’s philosophical orientation to writing in la scrittura di francesco petrarca, 58-70, expanded upon in storey, “petrarch’s concepts.” humanist studies & the digital age h. wayne storey 1.1 winter 2011 46 13 much of what follows on petrarch’s visual poetics is taken generally from storey, transcription and visual poetics, 225-419. for specifics on the five individual genres in the fragmenta, see storey, “all’interno.” for an excursus on the development of the transcription of italian lyrics in the dueand the trecento and the implications of that development in petrarch’s fragmenta, see brugnolo, 105-29. 14 see storey, “il codice pierpont morgan,” 501. by my calculations, if petrarch had not reverted to this singular departure from his transcriptional formula for the canzone, he would have needed to use an additional bifolium, one folded sheet, adding two chartae to the insert, something that would have drastically changed his material plan for the two loose bifolia that would become cc. 67-70 in vaticano latino 3195. this plan for an altered transcriptional formula that will fit the material support of the two bifolia signals additionally, i believe, his transformation of the codex into a service copy not for circulation. in the construction of a new fair copy, petrarch’s insert would have been “unpacked” into a more readable form and the renumbered compositions repositioned. 15 see the appendix of belloni, “storia,” 102-04, entitled “caratteristiche del vat. lat. 3195: guida agli indicatori per codici da esso trascritti,” and, for the codex’s “minimalia,” see storey, “l’edizione diplomatica di ettore modigliani,” in belloni, et al., 385-92. 16 modigliani, il canzoniere di francesco petrarca, now reproduced in belloni, et al., 181384, from which all citations are taken in this essay. 17 savoca, 6-7; bettarini, 18. 18 for additional discussion of the manuscript and early-print tradition, especially the case of valdezoco’s reading of “quel” in rvf 4, v. 1, see storey, review of savoca in textual cultures. 19 on the remnants of the process of erasure left on the parchment of vaticano latino 3195, see storey, “all’interno,” 142-43, and transcription, 353-77. 20 rovillio, 301; muratori, 446; carducci and ferrari, 322. 21 for my proposed restoration of petrarch’s intended reading of v. 9 of “geri, quando talor meco s’adira” (on c. 37r of the holograph) from the modern conjecture of “e.ccio non fusse and non altramente” to “se ciò non fusse” (guaranteed by the tradition against the holograph’s reading altered by a later hand) and other problematic readings, see storey, “doubting petrarca’s last words,” esp. 81-83 for an extended excursus on this reading. 22 see sandra giarin’s detailed study of bembo’s actual use of petrarch’s partial holograph “petrarca e bembo.” 23 see storey, “all’interno” 148-50 for a more extensive discussion of segniano 1’s replication of petrarch’s use of the mid-verse majuscule, a topic upon which i am preparing a more detailed study. works cited barolini, teodolinda. “petrarch at the crossroads of hermeneutics and philology: editorial lapses, narrative impositions, and wilkins’ 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studi di filologia italiana 62 (2004): 161-93. print. mestica, giovanni, ed. le rime di francesco petrarca restituite nell’ordine e nella lezione del testo originario sugli autografi col sussidio di altri codici e di stampe. firenze: barbèra, 1896. print. modigliani, ettore, ed. il canzoniere di francesco petrarca riprodotto letteralmente dal cod. vat. lat. 3195, con tre fotoincisioni. roma: società filologica romana, 1904. rpt. in belloni, et al 181-384. print. muratori, lodovico antonio, ed., le rime di francesco petrarca. modena: bartolomeo soliani stampatore ducale, 1711. print. paolino, laura, ed. “rime estravaganti.” francesco petrarca, trionfi, rime estravaganti, codice degli abbozzi. eds. vinicio pacca and laura paolino. milano: mondadori, 1996. 708-11. print. humanist studies & the digital age h. wayne storey 1.1 winter 2011 48 petrucci, armando. la scrittura di francesco petrarca. città del vaticano: biblioteca apostolica vaticana, 1967. print. pulsoni, carlo. “il metodo di 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scrittoio padovano di petrarca.” la cultura volgare padovana nell’età di petrarca. eds. furio brugnolo and zeno lorenzo verlato. padova: il poligrafo, 2006. 487-504. print. ---. “doubting petrarca’s last words,” in barolini and storey, 67-91. print. ---. “the economies of authority: bembo, vellutello and the reconstruction of authentic petrarch.” accessus ad auctores: studies in honor of christopher kleinhenz. eds. fabian alfie and andrea dini. tempe: medieval and renaissance texts and studies, forthcoming. print. ---. “l’edizione diplomatica di ettore modigliani.” belloni, et al. 385-92. ---. “the illusion of authentic philology: method and history.” neo-latin philology: old tradition, new approaches. ed. marc van der poole. leiden: brill, forthcoming. print. ---. “petrarch’s concepts of text and textual reform.” storey. transcription and visual poetics in the early italian lyric. 201-24. print. ---. rev. of canzoniere di petrarca tra codicologia ed ecdotica and francesco petrarca, rerum vulgarium fragmenta, edizione critica, by giuseppe savoca. textual cultures 5.2 (2010). print. ---.transcription and visual poetics in the early italian lyric. new york; london: garland,1993. print. storey, h. wayne and roberta capelli. “modalità di ordinamento materiale tra guittone e petrarca.” “liber,” “fragmenta,” “libellus” prima e dopo petrarca, in ricordo di d’arco humanist studies & the digital age h. wayne storey 1.1 winter 2011 49 silvio avalle (seminario internazionale di studi, bergamo, 23-25 ottobre 2003). eds. francesco lo monaco, luca carlo rossi and niccolò scaffai. firenze: sismel, edizioni del galluzzo, 2006. 169-86. print. valdezoco, bortolamio, ed. francesco petrarca, canzoniere, trionfi, memorabilia de laura. padova: valdezoco e martinius de septem arboribus, 1472. print. vattasso, marco, ed. l’originale del canzoniere di francesco petrarca, codice vaticano latino 3195, riprodotto in fototipia. milano: hoepli, 1905. print. wilkins, ernest hatch. the making of the canzoniere and other petrarchan studies. roma: edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1951. print. zamponi, stefano. “il libro del canzoniere: modelli, strutture, funzioni.” belloni, et al. 1372. petrarch’s “original” of the fragmenta 1362-1558: from boccaccio to rovillio’s third printing h. wayne storey, editor-in-chief, textual cultures * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * works cited <html> <body> <p>humanist studies &amp; the digital age, 5.1 (2017)<br /> issn: 2158-3846 (online)<br /> <a href="http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/">http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/</a><br /> doi: 10.7264/n3b27sqb</p> <p><strong>toward a distributed gallery in the scholarly network: how can we persuade universities to own their responsibilities to the practice-based research that they patronize – while bringing new fully-accredited methodologies and infrastructures to humanities and arts scholarship [video presentation]</strong></p> <p><em>john cayley</em></p> <h3>abstract</h3> <p>the long subtitle of this presentation sums up the fundamental question it addresses: how can we persuade universities to own their responsibilities to the practice-based research that they patronize – while bringing new, fully-accredited methodologies and infrastructures to arts and humanities scholarship? the “we” in this title-sentence refers to scholars interested not only in the opportunities offered by the digital infrastructure being built but willing to actively contribute to the designing of this infrastructure.</p> <p>link to keynote video: <a href="https://youtu.be/bnlmgd8yjhc">https://youtu.be/bnlmgd8yjhc</a></p> </body> </html> humanist studies & the digital age, 7.1 (2022) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda/7.1.5 1 unknown future, repeated present: a narrative-centered analysis of long-term ai discourse micaela simeone abstract: recent narratives and debates surrounding long-term ai concerns–the prospect of artificial general intelligence in particular–are fraught with hidden assumptions, priorities, and values. this paper employs a humanistic, narrative-centered approach to analyze the works of two vocal, and opposing, thinkers in the field–luciano floridi and nick bostrom–to ask how the representational, descriptive differences in their works reveal the high stakes of narrative choices for how we form ideas about humanity, urgency, risk, harm, and possibility in relation to ai. this paper closely reads floridi and bostrom using different representational models and historical narratives from works in the environmental humanities, literary theory, bioethics, and the history of technology to uncover the imaginative terrain of recent long-term ai discourse and reveal the complexity and limitations of the messaging underlying the works of different authors. as the digital sphere becomes increasingly populated by algorithms and machine-learning models, numerous scholars have shifted their focus beyond the present and towards the artificial intelligence (ai) of the future. philosopher and founding director of the oxford future of humanity institute nick bostrom has been a prominent voice making the case for the pertinence of long-term ai concerns. chiefly, bostrom has discussed at length the prospect of machine superintelligence: ai that would supersede human-level general intelligence. we are, of course, still in the era of narrow ai: the human brain possesses many capabilities beyond those of the most powerful ai. in other words, all signs indicate that the potential for superintelligence lies dormant for now. however, bostrom posits that artificial general intelligence–ai that can perform any intellectual task a human can–may arrive this century, and suggests that we might then see an intelligence explosion constituting a new shift in the knowledge substrate and resulting in superintelligence. bostrom has been vocal about the theoretical consequences of such an ai, often arguing that a superintelligence could constitute an existential threat to humanity. other academics conclude that long-term ai concerns are too indefinite and too far in the future to merit much discussion, arguing that our energies are better spent focused on short-term concerns stemming from the digital technologies that are already having profound impacts on our lives. oxford internet institute professor luciano floridi has been one of the central voices in this camp, even calling discussions about a possible intelligence explosion irresponsibly distracting. bostrom and floridi’s opposing voices constitute one region of long-term ai narratives, outside of many possible alternatives. a close reading of the works of authors on both sides can reveal the complex, yet familiar representational possibilities shaping the conversation about ai risks. since at least the 2014 publication of bostrom’s book superintelligence: paths, dangers, strategies, bostrom and floridi in particular have emerged as two of the more vocal thinkers in this conversation, and have often been positioned by sources as representatives of the opposing camps. for instance, a 2017 wired italy article explains that on the subject of existential threat from ai, “experts are divided,” and that “on the one hand, we find those who, like bostrom, … warn http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ humanist studies & the digital age simeone 7.1 2022 2 about the existential risks of … ai, [while] on the other hand there are thinkers such as luciano floridi … who underline how this scenario is not absolutely plausible” (signorelli, 2017).1 in a 2014 review of bostrom’s superintelligence as well as floridi’s the fourth revolution (2014), which is focused on the recent revolution in information and communication technologies (icts), philosopher john r. searle spends most of the work strongly challenging both authors’ theses, but in setting up his essay, he makes the point that “while floridi celebrates the revolution, bostrom is apocalyptic about the future” (searle, 2014). it is clear that the works of bostrom and floridi have emerged as particularly useful points of entry into an analysis of both sides of the long-term ai discussion. this paper examines the works of bostrom and floridi from a humanistic perspective with a literaryhistorical focus, uncovering the representational tensions within their clashing narratives of the future. such a reading can help us consider the following: how do our representations of change, the artificial, and the limits of the human in the face of ai have long-standing historical origins stretching back at least as far as the renaissance? how do the representational, descriptive differences across the works of bostrom and floridi reveal the high stakes of narrative choices for the way we conceptualize our technologies, their possibilities, and their risks? in a 2019 paper, authors macnaghten et al. put forth a narrative approach to examining atti tudes about emerging technologies, accomplishing the kind of rhetoric-focused analysis that this paper will attempt. specifically, the authors argue for an approach that “examines how public attitudes are formed in relation to the interplay of wider cultural narratives about science and technology” (504). similarly, this paper will examine how bostrom and floridi’s attitudes may be formed in relation to the interplay of historical narratives about technology as well as narratives interrogated in other fields, particularly in literary theory and the environmental humanities. the narratives i identify within the bostrom-floridi dialogue have strong ties to seemingly unrelated aspects of culture, history, ethics, and science, and discerning these connections helps to uncover the imaginative terrain of recent long-term ai discourse. section i considers narratives around the technological possibility versus plausibility of superintelligence to show how bostrom and floridi exhibit fundamentally different positions regarding speculation. i argue that these narrative differences also reflect a rift between gradualism and catastrophism seen in other fields, as well as emphasize either human or technological risks. section ii considers how environmental humanist rob nixon’s concept of “slow violence” offers a framework for unpacking the narrative problem presented by superintelligence; here, i argue that bostrom leans towards a model of spectacular, sudden, and visible violence while floridi centers slow, unspectacular, and often ignored violence. section iii looks at the moral layers of bostrom and floridi’s narratives, showing how they suggest allegiances to either beneficent or non-maleficent approaches to technology; this difference is indicative of a broader, basic rift between optimistic and pessimistic outlooks. in section iv, i argue that philosophy has been here before by recalling renaissance conceptions around technē to show how floridi and bostrom echo centuries-old narrative framings of technology and its relationship to humanity. in sum, narrative possibilities for imagining the risks of our technologies include utopia and dystopia, optimism and pessimism, and catastrophism and gradualism; what’s more, different narratives hoping to stake out what is urgent about technology can privilege modes of either spectacular violence or unseen violence as well as reflect varying moral priorities and faiths in humanity. because of this, the narrative choices that we make when we choose to imagine certain technological futures implicitly determine which harms we address, 1 translation mine. humanist studies & the digital age simeone 7.1 2022 3 how soon we act, whose voices we listen to, and, ultimately, reflect how much we trust our own human judgement as the arbiters of our technological present and future. additionally, if floridi and bostrom are two of the dominant voices shaping the long-term ai narrative, it is important to ascertain what expressive possibilities have been prioritized and which have been excluded or left unconsidered. i: probability, gradualism, and catastrophe the academic conversation about superintelligence consists of clashing narratives about reality and about the urgency of our present. for bostrom, one needs to look no further than the current state of the ai field for indications that longer-term concerns are worth considering: he emphasizes that while an intelligence explosion may not be imminent, because the field shows no signs of slowing down, ai safety measures and preventative strategizing are of utmost importance (322-3). floridi’s “now” on the other hand, is oriented around humanitarian problems that need solving, the current failures of the digital technologies that are already transforming our reality, and chiefly, our tendency to misuse them; floridi posits that we need ethical technological solutions (rather than fears about ai) now more than ever to deal with these problems (“new winter” 2). underpinning these different conceptions of what is important seems to be two different narratives about the present: bostrom’s faith in the danger of ai is based on a fear of unchecked technology and ai progress, while floridi’s faith in the possibility of technological solutions is based on a fear of unchecked human failings. the narrative importance of this question of how much we are willing to center the human in conversations about technology will become clearer in later analyses focused on the status of the human in both authors’ works–particularly, when discussing floridi’s narratives regarding human suffering and human ingenuity, and bostrom’s emphasis on humanity’s flawed nature. different judgements regarding possibility also color the superintelligence conversation. in defending the intellectual project of making predictions about superintelligence in the face of undeniable uncertainty and fallibility, bostrom writes, “refusing to offer probabilistic predictions would not make the epistemic problem go away; it would just hide it from view” (330). floridi, on the other hand, tells us that superintelligence is utterly implausible, “a mere logical possibility,” and therefore unworthy as a topic of serious discussion (“singularitarians” 8). underlying bostrom’s statement that the epistemic problem presented by superintelligence requires foresight is a model hinged on what fiction writer amitav ghosh has called “the centrality of the improbable” (ghosh, 23); in this model, logical possibility is enough–the improbable possibility of superintelligence is enough to merit an imagination of its risks and therefore to merit reasoning and strategy. for floridi, logical possibility is inadequate–the sudden and unimaginable, while possible, is not a priority, partly because it is the plausible (rather than the possible) that his model foregrounds. already, we can start to see how narrative differences in the superintelligence conversation have wider-ranging impacts–a focus on possibility warrants speculation about superintelligence in the first place, while a focus on plausibility stops this future from being imagined. arguably, inherent in bostrom’s speculative project are extravagant images of ai. though bostrom tries to distance the image of superintelligence from associations with unrestrained, overdramatized robot takeover narratives–even dedicating numerous pages to the examination of gradual, unspectacular paths to superintelligence–simply considering the basic idea of an intelligence explosion requires a willingness to confront the unimaginable. ghosh, in his 2016 book the great derangement: climate change and the unthinkable, explores the form of the modern, realist novel alongside the history of gradualist geological narratives, writing that both came about through a “banishing of the improbable and the insertion of the everyday” (17). for humanist studies & the digital age simeone 7.1 2022 4 ghosh, literary realism insists on telling stories that foreground the ordinary and relocate “the unheard-of toward the background” (17). similarly, ghosh explains, geologists have long navigated a divide between gradualist narratives that privilege a model where, as geologist michael rampino writes in cataclysms (2017), “slow and steady geologic processes” create the major changes in geologic history, and catastrophist theories that center evidence related to “episodic catastrophic and sweeping changes” (14-15). a similar tension related to gradualism, catastrophism, and unthinkability characterize bostrom and floridi’s different views on the intelligence explosion. ghosh paraphrases the gradualist view as saying “nature does not make leaps” (20); floridi makes a similar claim about ai when he criticizes the idea of an intelligence explosion by stressing that “a growth curve can easily be sigmoid” (“singularitarians” 9). unlike the sigmoid curve’s rise and fall trajectory, catastrophe works at “unpredictable intervals and in most improbable ways” (ghosh, 20). so does bostrom’s ai: bostrom often warns about the possibility of unexpected flaws in seemingly foolproof designs, perverse instantiations, unexpected breakthroughs, and sudden radical transformations where, for instance, the world is transformed and “humanity [is] deposed from its position as apex cogitator over the course of an hour or two” (superintelligence, 79). in sum, ghosh helps us see that storytelling models related to the spectacular or the ordinary, and the gradual or the catastrophic inform how bostrom and floridi’s respective messages follow well-established patterns for narratives about non-ai subjects. ultimately, examining how certain narrative themes such as gradualism and the unthinkable are embedded in bostrom and floridi’s texts point to a kind of literary concern for both authors related to how messaging around long-term ai can take on new meaning, even to the point of distortion, when imbued with certain images and tropes. in a 2017 book review, lisa swanstrom adeptly paraphrases ghosh, writing that in his assessment, “literary realism is especially ineffectual because it quashes speculation. nothing is allowed to enter the realist narrative that will appear shocking, out of the ordinary, or out of sequence when woven into the primary narrative thread … [ghosh] argues that such conventions fail us when we attempt to narrate our increasingly and shockingly unpredictable global climate” (402-3). for his part, bostrom is similarly concerned by the limits of speculation, lamenting at one point that the “pioneers of artificial intelligence … did not contemplate the possibility of greater-than-human ai. it is though the speculation muscle had so exhausted itself in conceiving the radical possibility of machines reaching human intelligence that it could not grasp the corollary–that machines would subsequently become superintelligent” (superintelligence, 5-6). while bostrom indicates that open-minded speculation is important, he later stresses the need for attention to how exactly this speculation is mediated or accomplished; at one point, bostrom tells us that a reasonable discussion about superintelligence is haunted by the anthropomorphized image of an evil superintelligent robot: “those inane terminator pictures are taking a toll” (323). floridi, too, is concerned with how cultural images may distort thought in ai research, at one point critiquing bostrom’s project by positing that speculation is the unserious and distracted realm of science-fiction (“new winter” 1). ghosh describes how, in early geologist circles, catastrophist theories positing “upheavals of sudden and unimaginable violence” were denounced as seductive, sensationalist magazine headlines (22-3). floridi has echoed this criticism, calling the futurologist perspective on ai “the curse of the airport bestseller” (“new winter” 3). in both floridi and bostrom’s arguments, then, a kind of literary concern focused on narrative choices and storytelling about technologies seems to underlie their perspectives. floridi’s faith in the urgency of the present and bostrom’s faith in the danger of ai share in common a kind of ethics for writing about the spectacular: we should be wary of the use of limitless imaginative variations as tools for conceptualizing the risks of technologies. humanist studies & the digital age simeone 7.1 2022 5 ii: representational ethics and the digital realm narrative focus on the spectacular can perpetuate a kind of imbalance where such narratives wield more storytelling power and thus gain more traction than narratives of the slow, gradual, and unseen. in his 2011 book slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor, author and environmental humanist rob nixon urges environmental activists to pay attention to “slow violence” and explores how the reality of slow violence constitutes a representational, literary challenge. nixon’s concept of slow violence can do a lot to help unpack the narrative problem of long-term ai concerns and its stakes. first, it may be helpful to understand what slow violence is not: the opposite of slow violence is “violence [that] is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility” (nixon, 2). this spectacular, explosive, and instantly visible violence is the landscape of bostrom’s intelligence explosion. bostrom does acknowledge that existential catastrophe need not be the default outcome of the creation of a superintelligence. however, his work emphasizes how the first superintelligence may have the advantages necessary to shape the future of life on earth, could easily have non-anthropomorphic goals, and would likely have instrumental reasons to pursue open-ended resource acquisition; in light of these considerations, bostrom tells us, “we can see that the outcome could easily be one in which humanity quickly becomes extinct” (141). though he does distinguish three classes of transition scenarios–slow, moderate, and fast (77)–bostrom urges us not to dismiss the possibility of a sudden radical transformation in artificial general intelligence as fanciful, telling us that “if and when a takeoff occurs, it will likely be explosive” (79). this explosive transformation, according to bostrom, would result in incredible geopolitical, social, and economic upheaval, and would possibly result in a singleton, a single machine superintelligence project which has attained a decisive strategic advantage, “a level of technological and other advantages sufficient to enable it to achieve complete world domination” (96). bostrom’s vision of the singleton, then, would achieve the kind of spectacular violence nixon describes; the singleton comes into violent being explosively and spectacularly, making itself at once visible and permanent. upon attaining its strategic advantage, bostrom’s singleton could, if it were motivated to do so, eliminate the human species in a single “strike,” or it could immediately embark on a massive global construction project suitable to the realization of its own goals but resulting in humanity’s demise due to widespread habitat destruction (bostrom, 118). at almost every opportunity, bostrom’s singleton scenario resists any gradualizing, de-dramatizing effects. at one point, bostrom posits that even those strategies which may have previously worked with a seed ai (a model intended to become superintelligent) could suddenly backfire in what he calls “the treacherous turn” where a previously cooperative ai, once it becomes stronger, strikes and forms a singleton without warning or provocation (144). the violence of the superintelligence of bostrom’s imaginative project is both spectacular and instantaneous; nixon can help us see how these qualities give the singleton scenario a certain narrative power. first, however, it will be helpful to explore the particular technological “slow violence” which this spectacular violence model renders invisible, and which i argue floridi hopes to bring into the forefront. at the core of nixon’s slow violence concept is a compelling argument for including marginalized voices into existing narratives that privilege the spectacular. environmental discourse, like ai discourse, would benefit from those perspectives that are often dismissed, such as perspectives from the global south. nixon argues that we need to understand a different kind of violence from that sensational violence we are used to: “a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (2). this violence is what nixon calls “slow humanist studies & the digital age simeone 7.1 2022 6 violence”: a “violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2). as we have seen, floridi has been one of the most vocal critics of the conversation about machine superintelligence, and about the singleton “takeover” scenario in particular. now, i want to argue that floridi’s criticism of superintelligence speculation takes on a new narrative dimension: we can read floridi’s call to attention regarding present-day technology problems as a call to recognize the slow violence that is afflicted by our digital artifacts. in discussing past u.s and european international environmental schemes, nixon locates the harms caused by these schemes within the sphere of slow violence. he explains that with slow violence’s quiet, long-term casualties and invisible, unspectacular harms, the victims of this kind of violence are often silently displaced; on the international stage, for example, richer nations come to view the harms inflicted on citizens of poorer nations as “out-of-sight” and “remote from … activists’ terrain of concern” (2). floridi leverages a very similar critique against those he calls the “singularitarians”–those thinkers who, like bostrom, are concerned by the prospect of an intelligence explosion resulting in superintelligence (“singularitarians” 8). in a 2020 article, floridi argues that thinkers who frame ai as humanity’s greatest existential risk speak “as if most of humanity did not live in misery and suffering. as if wars, famine, pollution, global warming, social injustice, and fundamentalism were science fiction, or just negligible nuisances, unworthy of their considerations” (“new winter” 1-2). here, floridi suggests that the profound risk of the spectacular violence model of superintelligence is that it erases the everyday but extremely urgent and human problems. floridi mirrors nixon in these criticisms. for floridi, the focus on superintelligence positions the current-day sufferings of humanity as out-of-sight, thereby discounting the long-term, nebulous, and often silent violence that accompanies these sufferings in favor of the spectacular narrative of the ai singleton. floridi wants to redirect attention to the already-pertinent challenges of our digital technologies; he sums up this critique when he claims, “the futurologists find these questions boring” (“new winter” 3). floridi’s criticism that the singleton narrative pushes aside the “boring” concerns of present-day technologies suggests that the digital realm lends itself to a nixon-esque slow violence. for instance, we might ask, how does bias in ai operate as a form of slow violence? ai research lab openai’s third generation generative pre-trained transformer (gpt-3), a machine-learning model that uses its deep-learning experience to generate human-like text, is a good example of how reading technology harms in terms of slow violence may be more beneficial than catastrophizing. gpt-3 learns language by studying the statistical patterns in a dataset of roughly one trillion words collected from the web (brown et. al, 8). however, researchers have found that biases present in gpt3’s vast training corpus of internet text has led the ai to internalize these patterns and generate stereotyped and prejudiced content as a result (brown et. al, 36). nixon describes slow violence as leaving behind “hushed havoc” which “eludes … tidy closure … [or] containment” (6). similarly, gpt-3’s internalization of the internet’s nebulous web of social, political, and sentimental patterns happens quietly–within the opaque layers of gpt-3’s neural network–and leaves behind harms that elude any easy fix. these harms are felt most by those at the margins, both in terms of minimal representation in the model and in terms of minimal control over ai systems; these are the same populations that are impacted disproportionately by the other kinds of slow violence which nixon describes. gpt-3 is not yet publicly available; however, we do not need to look beyond our already ubiquitous digital artifacts to locate the slow violence of ai bias. a 2013 paper by linguistics scholars paul baker and amanda potts explores the bias of google autocomplete algorithms which internalize queries to do their job, but in doing so often reflect “-ism” statements and biases when generating suggestions based on common searches humanist studies & the digital age simeone 7.1 2022 7 (187). nixon further describes the slow-moving and long-in-the-making disasters of slow violence as disasters “that are anonymous and star nobody” (3); the casualties of these disasters typically pass untallied and unremembered. such discounting in turn makes it far more difficult to “secure legal measures for prevention, restitution, and re-dress” (9). a similar discounting is accomplished by the kind of ai bias baker and potts describe. the silent embeddedness of algorithmic bias means that the targets of digital prejudice are almost never named and made visible. the scalability of such algorithms and their ubiquitous but invisible operation within the architectures of the internet mean that prevention and restitution for their harms is a complex and elusive project (noble). by analyzing the digital as a realm of slow violence, we are better able to see how floridi’s call to action is one that asks us to reckon with this slow violence, the hidden but already urgent human struggles that are shaped by our own misuse of digital technologies (“singularitarians” 10). when juxtaposed with the slow violence of the present-day digital sphere, the narrative power of bostrom’s singleton scenario becomes all the clearer. a superintelligence takeover scenario constitutes a representational success in what nixon describes as an age “when the media venerate the spectacular” (3). like those environmental spectacles nixon describes– “burning towers, … avalanches, volcanoes, and tsunamis” (3)–the image of the superintelligence singleton also has a “visceral, eye-catching, and page-turning power that tales of slow violence, unfolding over years, decades, even centuries, cannot match” (3). for floridi, it seems, our project should be to infuse the amorphous calamities of global, long-standing human sufferings and digital failings with the dramatic urgency of the superintelligence narrative, but with an eye towards solutions and not organized around fears. for floridi, “ai must be treated as a normal technology, neither as a miracle nor as a plague, and as one of the many solutions that human ingenuity has managed to devise” (“new winter” 2). ultimately, in floridi’s view, listening to the spectacular superintelligence narrative stops us from reckoning with the current, non-spectacular harms inflicted by humans and taking place in a present that is already being reshaped by our technologies in profound ways. in a 2016 paper, “invasive narratives and the inverse of slow violence,” authors lidström et al. consider nixon’s argument that “a lack of ‘arresting stories, images, and symbols’ reduces the visibility of gradual problems … in cultural imaginations and on political agendas” (1). this is essentially the same concern that floridi has about the superintelligence narrative—for him, the pull to imagine a spectacular intelligence explosion is arresting and intoxicating, and diverts energies from focusing on solutions. notably, lidström et al. call the problem of difference between arresting stories and slow violence–which does not capture attention in the same way–a “representational imbalance” (1). for floridi, addressing this problem means framing ai as a normal technology and as a solution. the idea of representational imbalance provides useful vocabulary for emphasizing how action and philosophy around ai can be shaped by rhetorical choices. lidström et al. add on to nixon’s work, arguing that the tools leveraged by the imbalance itself can be part of how slow violence can become foregrounded; the authors advocate an approach that “unpack[s] the ways that complicated and multifaceted … phenomena can be reduced to fast, simple, evocative, invasive narratives that percolate through science, legislation, policy, and civic action” (1). floridi’s criteria that ai be treated “neither as a miracle nor as a plague” seems to preclude the possibility for an evocative, invasive narrative, but it is a possibility worth considering. regardless, it is clear that the bostrom-floridi, long-term/short-term ai rift is partly also one between narratives and priorities related to different kinds of violence and harm. these considerations require us to ask where spectacular narratives about ai may also result in a beneficial framing of ai concerns. this question brings us back to ghosh, particularly, to his assertion that we are, in the humanist studies & the digital age simeone 7.1 2022 8 context of climate change, living in a time of distinctive events that resists the imposition of a false and immobilizing narrative of regularity. ghosh posits that “we are now in an era that will be defined precisely by events that appear, by our current standards of normalcy, highly improbable” (24). elsewhere, he writes that “the anthropocene has already disrupted many assumptions that were founded on the relative climatic stability of the holocene” (21). similarly, bostrom and other superintelligence thinkers ask us to consider how previously extraordinary technological conditions we now take to be ordinary suggest that we would benefit from at least considering worst-case ai scenarios in the absence of certainty that they will never come into fruition. stuart russell, berkeley professor and ai researcher, has argued in favor of the superintelligence conversation, pointing out in 2015 that scientific breakthroughs can often surprise researchers in the field themselves: “some have argued that there is no conceivable risk to humanity [from ai] for centuries to come, perhaps forgetting that the interval of time between rutherford’s confident assertion that atomic energy would never be feasibly extracted and szilárd’s invention of the neutron-induced nuclear chain reaction was less than twenty-four hours” (russell, 2015). similarly, bostrom recalls unexpected leaps made by ai; at one point, he writes that “it was once supposed ... that in order for a computer to play chess at grandmaster level, it would have to be endowed with a high degree of general intelligence (...). it turned out to be possible to build a perfectly fine chess engine around a special-purpose algorithm” (14). bostrom’s underlying point here is that some of our earlier assumptions about human intelligence have been proven wrong by ai in the past, so future dramatic shifts in ai’s relationship to human intelligence cannot be entirely discounted. bostrom is also careful to note that ai is already outperforming human intelligence in certain domains, and that if these achievements do not seem impressive to us it is only because “our standards for what is impressive keep adapting to the advances being made” (14). the digital realm, in this view, is not characterized by slow violence but is instead increasingly marked by distinctiveness and previously discounted, marvelous achievements. in this model, the project of assessing implications of future technologies before they become feasible requires a willingness (justified by history) to engage with the possibility of the spectacular, the sudden, and the immediate, however improbable. there is a complication to this reading, however: in his november 2015 afterword in a republished edition of superintelligence, bostrom is careful to note that his argument is not that an intelligence explosion is imminent, but that it is pertinent nevertheless to consider the improbability of a recurrent ai winter as severe as those the field has experienced in the past (322) due to funding and reputability flowing into the field which show no signs of slowing. so, while bostrom does seem to align himself with a representational ethics of the spectacular, this moment from his afterword suggests that he really feels that the main loss of the floridi argument (we ought to focus our energies entirely on the slow violence of the here and now) is that we do not fully reckon with the reality of ai’s incremental but notable progress. as discussed, it seems that floridi would see the digital as engaged in a kind of slow violence before our eyes, and bostrom’s entire imaginative project regarding superintelligence is predicated on a conviction that ai is incrementally becoming formidable. so, in addition to the shared dislike of fully imaginative, science fiction relationships to ai concerns, there is another strange similarity between bostrom and floridi’s narratives: both authors do suggest that our current digital landscape is making gradual progress worth paying close attention to. iii: moral narratives thus far, i have only briefly touched on how floridi’s argument navigates our focus away from fears of the dangers of ai and towards the urgency of technological solutions. this consideration can lead us to see humanist studies & the digital age simeone 7.1 2022 9 how different moral priorities are embedded in bostrom and floridi’s different representational choices. bostrom’s narrative reveals a prioritization of non-maleficence, while floridi’s privileges beneficence. both bostrom and floridi are concerned with the ethical and moral implications of digital technologies. however, underlying both authors’ thoughts about how we might ensure that digital technology serves the interests of humanity and promotes the common good is a distinction between the negative principle (“do no harm”) and the positive principle (“do good”) in ai development–principles which, notably, are widely applied in bioethics (mccormick). put another way, approaches toward developing principled ai can be either about ensuring that those systems are beneficent or ensuring they are non-maleficent. though bostrom does present a “common good principle” which says that “superintelligence should be developed only for the benefit of all humanity and in the service of widely shared ethical ideals” (312), his overarching sentiment is that we ought to be very careful with ai development in order to avoid the wide-ranging harm possible with general machine intelligence. floridi takes the opposite approach when he accuses those concerned with superintelligence of misleading public opinion to be fearful of ai progress rather than knowledgeable about the potential and muchneeded solutions ai could bring about. echoing the beneficence principle, floridi writes, “we need all the good technology that we can design, develop, and deploy to cope with these challenges, and all human intelligence we can exercise to put this technology in the service of a better future” (“new winter” 2). in his afterword, bostrom echoes the non-maleficence principle when he writes, “whereas we might get by with a vague sense that there are (astronomically) great things to hope for if the machine intelligence transition goes well, it seems more urgent that we develop a precise detailed understanding of what specific things could go wrong—so that we can make sure to avoid them” (superintelligence 324). there are risks with both models. with the beneficence approach, one potentially risks sidelining preventative ai safety mechanisms in the pursuit of more pressing technological solutions, resulting in what bostrom calls an “ai safety winter” (323). arguably, the beneficence model’s dedication to socially good ai requires a commitment to comprehensively answering the thorny question, “whose common good?” these considerations aside, the beneficence approach seems to center humanitarian motives in ways the nonmaleficence approach may overlook. bostrom’s harm-centric view of long-term ai may lead to somewhat impersonal calculations of how best to avoid specific risks or outcomes. in a final chapter on strategic considerations, bostrom calls for a focus on elastic problems, “problems that can be solved much faster, or solved to a much greater extent, given one extra unit of effort” (316). he explains that while “achieving world peace … would be highly desirable, … considering the numerous efforts already targeting that problem, and the formidable obstacles arrayed against a quick solution, it seems unlikely that the contributions of a few extra individuals would make a large difference” (316). floridi, it seems, would take the opposite view, to argue instead that the development of socially good ai in the service of the common good should be where we focus our energies. to get to bostrom’s spectacular singleton scenario, we need to embark on an imaginative exercise that centers risk and attempts to formulate all possible worst-case futures. to get to floridi’s vision of socially good ai, our imaginative exercise instead centers optimism about technology solutions in the first place and the beneficent, useful possibilities of digital technologies and ai. iv: comparable renaissance narratives on the works of technē this simple but fundamental difference in the imaginative exercises of bostrom and floridi–pessimism versus optimism–has origins stretching at least as far back as the european renaissance (1450-1700), predating the industrial revolution and any recognizable relationship to the technologies of today. renaissance thinkers humanist studies & the digital age simeone 7.1 2022 10 navigated the increasing presence of mechanism in their lives with similar representational and narrative differences to those within the long-term ai discussion. the similarities can reveal what has always been at stake in the work of creating narratives and imagining possibilities for technology and its place in the world. the tension between “art” and nature is a defining theme within the works of renaissance philosophers, artists, and authors. the term “art” was used to describe the man-made world of devices, instruments, and other human interventions in nature. historian jonathan sawday, in his 2007 book engines of the imagination: renaissance culture and the rise of the machine, writes about the art/nature distinction which shaped attitudes towards the artificial world of renaissance europe. sawday tells us that over the course of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, as increasingly complex mechanical devices and other human arts came into being, two conflicting attitudes–one optimistic and one pessimistic–arose from the “aristotelian distinction between the natural world and the artificial world of technē” (sawday, 3). some thinkers saw the works of technē as the expression of human ingenuity working alongside nature to bring about a better and more useful world. at the same time, others perceived the arts with more skepticism, seeing many productions of art as vain attempts to shape nature. the optimists viewed the works of art as man’s ultimate accomplishment, while the pessimists viewed them as markers of man’s fallen, labor-bound state (sawday, 3-4). centuries later, similar drives to wrangle the productions of technology into either utopian or dystopian narratives persist. while the opinions of bostrom and floridi are altogether more nuanced than optimism and pessimism, there are aspects of their positions which reveal similar fundamental hopes or despondencies about man’s relationship to technology. as we have seen, floridi in part optimistically aligns human ingenuity with technology, writing that ai must be treated as “one of the many solutions that human ingenuity has managed to devise” (“new winter” 2). sawday writes about the optimistic view of man-made devices during the renaissance that these thinkers felt that such devices promised a partial theological restitution–the original disaster of the fall of humanity in eden could be alleviated through technē “working in the service of humankind and understood as a product of human ingenuity” (3). though floridi’s narrative does not include this religious dimension, his view of ai seems to be bolstered by a similar faith in the controllability of technology–ai models are extensions of human vision and human craft, and thus can be made to work on our behalf and reflect our values in order to rectify or repair some of the damage humans have caused. floridi also writes that our planetary problems, including global warming, social injustice, and migration, would benefit from ai solutions because ai can give us “increasingly smarter ways of processing immense quantities of data, sustainably and efficiently” (2). this statement reflects another optimism about ai: the smarter the ai, the more potential for good. in other words, floridi expresses a faith in the power of ai’s unique form of intelligence to solve humanity’s problems. in general, floridi’s faith seems to lie in ai’s potential ability to complement human ingenuity, intelligence, and reason rather than inherently reflect our faults. bostrom’s writings communicate a different narrative–one that aligns itself instead with sawday’s description of the pessimistic view of renaissance devices. sawday tells us that the pessimists saw technē as conflicting with nature and even god, and felt that “despite their usefulness, machines were products of fallible human reason, and as such they were always to be considered as tainted in some way” (4). similarly, bostrom also often pessimistically aligns technology with human error and inadequacy. in describing incentive-based methods for controlling the motivations of a seed ai, bostrom notes that one problem with this path is that the ai may not trust the human operator to deliver the promised rewards because, after all, “the track record of human reliability is something other than a straight line of perfection” (163). this is one example of bostrom taking care to account for all the possible ways human error and fault could make their way into the humanist studies & the digital age simeone 7.1 2022 11 technological architecture of a superintelligence. in a later section, bostrom writes that “human nature … is flawed and all too often reveals a proclivity to evil which would be intolerable in any system poised to attain a decisive strategic advantage” (232). interestingly, to address this issue, bostrom ends up recommending the design of an unabashedly artificial system rather than a more neuromorphic one (232). so, not only does bostrom echo the renaissance pessimist view that the works of technē are at risk of reflecting human defect, but he also takes a step farther and expresses a willingness to decenter the human as the intellectual center of the universe, advocating a totally artificial alternative. the confrontation of the possibility that machines may rival humanity’s natural capabilities also has origins at least as far back as the european renaissance. in a 2007 essay, scholar of shakespeare and renaissance humanism scott maisano writes that renaissance automata– mechanical, self-moving, mechanical objects that populated the period’s royal gardens and other estates, and which were fascinations and marvels to numerous key philosophical figures of the time, including francis bacon and descartes–were “fantasy figures of consistency, competency, and self-control” which possessed levels of “endurance and efficiency … [that] set the (impossible) standard for human conduct” (75). bostrom’s willingness to de-anthropomorphize perhaps gets at the core of his narrative project as compared to floridi’s. for bostrom, the future is artificially intelligent–less-than-genius humans will need to recognize our shortcomings in the face of increasingly powerful ai and contribute this awareness to our ai design processes if we are to ensure that ai remains on our side. conversely, for floridi, the future is human– digital technologies can work on our behalf and they can be subject to misuse but either way, the momentum behind any change will be human. renaissance thinkers were confronting many philosophical upheavals as the onset of the scientific revolution while new devices began to shift humans’ relationship to nature. today, we are confronting a digital sphere that is reshaping our relations to one another, our political lives, our conceptions about what it means to be human, and more. renaissance philosophers found out that grappling with these issues involves a reckoning with either our utopian hopes or our dystopian fears. whether we side with bostrom, floridi, or land somewhere in the middle, the narrative choices we make in our imaginings of ai will shape considerations about humanity’s place in a technology-driven world. conclusion a narrative-centered analysis of long-term ai discourse and its historical precedents reveals how certain narratives and approaches are privileged over others, such as bostrom’s spectacular singleton narrative or renaissance europe’s emphasis on human ingenuity in the mechanical arts. in addition, reading floridi alongside nixon shows how certain narratives can erase many experiences and perspectives and why ai discourse, like environmental discourse, ought to account for marginalized narratives. however, it is important to acknowledge that both floridi and nixon (as well as bostrom and others cited in this paper) represent historically privileged perspectives–white, male, european, american. in conclusion, it is worth noting that a reading like this one which seeks to uncover the narrative challenges and possibilities surrounding the topic of long-term ai risks moves us to ask who is speaking. in other words, how might other voices offer alternative narrative possibilities to the white, patriarchal, european perspectives represented by thinkers like floridi and bostrom? floridi does continually remind us of the other voices needed in conversations about technology’s impacts–particularly, voices from marginalized and disenfranchised groups–and nixon’s slow violence also makes clear the need for a conception of violence that makes visible the often ignored injustices impacting, particularly, communities in the global south. it has been this paper’s purpose to show that a narrative-focused analysis of discourse about long-term ai risk ultimately leaves us with an understanding of how representational humanist studies & the digital age simeone 7.1 2022 12 choices alter our conceptual relationships to our technologies in real and impactful ways. once we acknowledge this, it becomes clear that representational models from non-white, feminist, queer, indigenous, and global south perspectives, to name a few, could point to alternative futures yet to be imagined or recognized by those thinkers who have been driving our technology narratives thus far. one example of an alternative model is presented by scholar of law and ai ethics suvradip maitra in a 2020 paper that considers the value of indigenous epistemologies to a conversation about increasingly general ai. in particular, maitra highlights how numerous indigenous perspectives offer “well-developed epistemologies adept at accounting for the non-human, a task that defies western anthropocentrism,” and that would thus potentially provide useful steps toward finding new ways to frame our relationship with ai as ai models become more powerful and their capabilities challenge our conceptions of human and machine (320). these reflections get to the core of what is at stake in the narrative choices made when imagining ai futures and contemplating our digital present: diverse outlooks on the possibilities of our technologies and varying faiths about humanity’s role in realizing them. works cited baker and potts. “‘why do white people have thin lips?’ google and the perpetuation of stereotypes via autocomplete search forms.” critical discourse studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 2013, pp. 187-204. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2012.744320 bostrom, nick. superintelligence: paths, dangers, strategies, 2014, oxford university press, rpt. 2017. print. brown et al. “language models are few-shot learners.” arxiv preprint, 2014, arxiv:2005.14165. floridi, luciano. “ai and its new winter: from myths to realities.” philosophy & technology, vol. 33, 2020, pp. 1-3, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00396-6. floridi, luciano. “singularitarians, aitheists, and why the problem with artificial intelligence is h.a.l (humanity at large), not hal.” apa newsletter on philosophy and computers, vol. 14, no. 2, 2015, pp. 8-10. print. ghosh, amitav. the great derangement: climate change and the unthinkable, university of chicago press, 2016. print. lidström et al. “invasive narratives and the inverse of slow violence: alien species in science and society,” environmental humanities, vol. 7, no. 1, may 2016, pp. 1–40, https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3616317 macnaghten, phil, et al., “understanding public responses to emerging technologies: a narrative approach”, journal of environmental policy & planning, vol. 21, no. 5, 2019, pp. 504-518, https://doi.org/10.1080/1523908x.2015.1053110 maisano, scott. “infinite gesture: automata and the emotions in descartes and shakespeare,” genesis redux: essays in the history and philosophy of artificial life, edited by jessica riskin, university of chicago press, 2007. print. maitra, suvradip. “artificial intelligence and indigenous perspectives: protecting and empowering intelligent human beings,” proceedings of the aaai/acm conference on ai, ethics, and society (aies ‘20), association for computing machinery, new york, ny, 320-326, https://doi.org/10.1145/3375627.3375845 https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2012.744320 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00396-6 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3616317 https://doi.org/10.1080/1523908x.2015.1053110 https://doi.org/10.1145/3375627.3375845 humanist studies & the digital age simeone 7.1 2022 13 mccormick, thomas r., “principles of bioethics,” university of washington medicine department of bioethics and humanities, university of washington, accessed 25 sep 2021, https://depts.washington.edu/bhdept/ethics-medicine/bioethics-topics/articles/principles-bioethics nixon, rob. slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor, harvard university press, 2011. proquest. print. noble, safiya. algorithms of oppression, nyu press, 2018. rampino, michael, r., cataclysms: a new geology for the twenty-first century, columbia university press, 2017, https://doi.org/10.7312/ramp17780. russell, stuart. “2015: what do you think about machines that think?” edge, 2015, www.edge.org/responsedetail/26157. sawday, jonathan. engines of the imagination: renaissance culture and the rise of the machine, routledge, 2007. print. searle, john r., “what your computer can’t know,” the new york review, 9 october 2014, https://nybooks.com/articles/2014/10/09/what-your-computer-cant-know/ signorelli, andrea, d., “tre leggi per regolare l’intelligenza artificiale,” translation mine, wired italia, 13 oct 2017, https://www.wired.it/gadget/computer/2017/10/13/tre-leggi-regolare-intelligenza-artificiale/ swanstrom, lisa, “serious literature? science fiction at the mla,” science fiction studies, vol. 44, no. 2, sf-th inc, 2017, pp. 402-404, https://doi.org/10.5621/sciefictstud.44.2.0402. https://depts.washington.edu/bhdept/ethics-medicine/bioethics-topics/articles/principles-bioethics https://doi.org/10.7312/ramp17780 http://www.edge.org/response-detail/26157 http://www.edge.org/response-detail/26157 https://nybooks.com/articles/2014/10/09/what-your-computer-cant-know/ https://www.wired.it/gadget/computer/2017/10/13/tre-leggi-regolare-intelligenza-artificiale/ https://doi.org/10.5621/sciefictstud.44.2.0402 unknown future, repeated present: a narrative-centered analysis of long-term ai discourse micaela simeone i: probability, gradualism, and catastrophe ii: representational ethics and the digital realm iii: moral narratives iv: comparable renaissance narratives on the works of technē conclusion works cited microsoft word buzzetti_priani-pico15_final.docx the pico project: looking ahead dino buzzetti 1 and ernesto priani saisó 2 1olim university of bologna 2 universidad nacional autonoma de méxico (unam) 1. the digitisation of the conclusiones nongentae disputandae at the virtual humanities lab of brown university opens up new research prospects for the pico project. the edited text is an accurate transcription of the editio princeps printed in rome by eucharius silber on 7 december 1486. pico’s conclusiones, or theses, is a collection of short statements composed on the authority of former thinkers and schools, as well as according to his own opinion, on a wide range of philosophical and theological topics. right at the outset of his “preface,” pico describes his own work with these words: the following nine hundred dialectical, moral, physical, mathematical, metaphysical, theological, magical, and cabalistic opinions, including his own and those of the wise chaldeans, arabs, hebrews, greeks, egyptians, and latins, will be disputed publicly by giovanni pico of mirandola, the count of concord. in reciting these opinions, he has not imitated the splendor of the roman language, but the style of speaking of the most celebrated parisian disputers, since this is used by almost all philosophers of our time. the doctrines to be debated are proposed separately by nations and their sect leaders, but in common in respect to the parts of philosophy—as though in a medley, everything mixed together. (farmer and pico 1998, 211) pico’s theses deal with an astonishing amount of different subjects and refer to a large number of authors belonging to several philosophical and religious traditions. this means that their invention rested upon a prior knowledge of a vast and eclectic variety of doctrines and works. as stephen farmer observes, “no one can claim mastery over more than a small part of the traditions covered in pico’s text” (xiv), and so the problem of tracing back all of his sources still remains an open question. pico’s theses are organised in two main groups: the first 400 “historical theses” (32) according to the opinion of past philosophers, and the remaining 500 theses according to his own opinion. in turn, the philosophers’ opinions are grouped by nations or sects—the latins, the arabs, the greek peripatetics and platonists, the pythagorean, chaldean, hermetic, and cabalist wisemen—and for each nation by their sect leaders, such as albert the great, thomas aquinas, averroes and so on. so apparently we should know to whom the ideas conveyed by a given thesis is to be ascribed. but again farmer warns us that “it is important to recognize that not all or even most of the nine hundred theses can be traced unambiguously to single sources”, since many of them “express opinions assigned to authorities by common consent,” and “others turn those opinions intentionally on their heads, apparently as challenges to rival philosophers.” moreover, “pico drew some of his theses from epitomes, anthologies or florilegia, or even wholly from oral sources” and indeed others can be found that “combine materials from his sources in a highly idiosyncratic fashion, making it impossible again to point to one passage or another as his immediate source,” since “he often compressed ideas spread out over dozens of pages […] into the exaggerated correlative forms characteristic of his own thought (192–93). however, farmer also admits that “in some cases, it is possible to follow pico as he moves page by page through certain texts, drawing theses from various scholastic commentaries on peter lombard’s sentences or from favorite greek sources” (192). accordingly we decided, for a start, to concentrate on medieval authors, considering that digitised corpora of their works are available for most of them. but also in these cases, we still have to face the difficulty buzzetti & priani / 2 of locating, for the majority of the theses, possibly exact references to the works of the author they are ascribed to. 2. the research activity of the artfl encyclopédie project at the university of chicago1 offers an instructive case of the application of digital-assisted approaches to text analysis in the successive stages of development of computational tools applied to textual studies. scholars working at the project have all along been fully aware of the kind of opportunities offered to researchers by the diverse technologies available from time to time. the project avails itself of philologic, a tool developed specifically to work on the treasury of the french language, which provides full-text search, retrieval and analysis functionalities and has been continually upgraded to allow the collaborative development of higher-level, interoperable tools for humanities computing applications.2 artfl scholars discern three successive main stages of development of computational tools that enabled three distinct hermeneutical approaches, focussing respectively on “the interaction of digital methods with the text, the context, and the intertext” (roe 2014, 89).3 the first approach, practised already far before the digital turn, consists in the traditional provision of concordances, usually presented in digital form as key words in context (kwics). this method “is the oldest, simplest, and in many ways the most powerful tool of navigation and exploration of the texts” and it gives the opportunity “to compare different uses of a word in the context of the other words that surround it” (morissey et al. 2016, 603). accordingly, an interactive concordance programme affords “instant searching for words or combinations of words through large sets of texts” (604), so that “it gives an idea of their use and the lexical field in which they occur most frequently” (roe 2014, 92). but together with those advantages, this approach shows also its limitations: “the specificity of the keyword and of its particular context drops gradually out of sight” (roe 2014, 94), when dealing with increasingly larger corpora. therefore, new analytical tools for search and retrieval are needed. in the succeeding phase the attention was directed to implementing more efficient search and retrieval tools to explore word contexts in large digitised text collections. the study of context became the chief concern and distant reading was the “response to the growth of the digital contexts” (roe 2014, 95). the resulting approach to text became overwhelmingly quantitative and induced analytical practices that were severely undermining textual integrity by “reducing the texts or parts of the texts to one or several ‘bags of words’ ”(morissey et al. 2016, 606). on the other hand, however, a capacity arose “to consider not only the raw frequency of words, but also their lexical field” (roe 2014, 97). this led up to developing data mining tools, mostly based on machine learning. the resulting algorithms were then more “concerned about the frequency of words in relation to each other” and the “frequency distribution of words” (morissey et al. 2016, 607). “automatic classifiers” (roe 2014, 99) were implemented to classify documents and to “establish ontologies that allow to navigate through massive textual collections,” by building “a representation of the discursive content of each of these classes” (morissey et al. 2016, 607). moreover, by representing the frequencies of words as vectors in an n-dimensional space, algorithms were developed, that “seek to identify similar content by measuring lexical distance between items in a vector space” (611–12). so, “lexical similarity measures” (roe 2014, 101) can be defined, since “the proximity of two vectors indicates a similarity in terms of the vocabularies and the frequency distribution of these vocabularies” (morissey et al. 2016, 612). 1 artfl encyclopédie project. accessed 4 march 2017. https://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/. 2 philologic. accessed 5 march 2017. https://sites.google.com/site/philologic3/home. 3 all translations of texts in french are ours. buzzetti & priani / 3 thus, since concordances hardly help in the exploration of large corpora, new methods have been introduced to inspect word contexts and vocabularies through the classification of texts, the development of ontologies, and the identification of lexical similarities. to support these new methods, new text technologies have been developed to “help the mobility between the macroanalysis or distant reading of massive collections and the microanalysis or close reading of the digital texts,” in brief, to afford the interplay “between the text and the context, through the intertext” (roe 2014, 103-104). finally, as regards the investigation of intertextual relations, the “heuristic value” (morissey et al. 2016, 609) of such new methods is indisputable, but the “limitations” of these tools are equally obvious, since they tend to “remove the order of deployment of the words, so essential to the construction of sense” (613). accordingly, in a later phase, sequence alignment techniques were used to identify similar passages. glenn roe quotes roland barthes —“every text is an intertext [...] every text is a new web of past quotations” (barthes 1973, 1013) — to stress the hermeneutical significance of a thorough investigation of text reuse. intertextuality, then, becomes the “theoretical foundation” of further digital implementations (roe 2014, 104). 3. finding the sources of pico’s theses in an author’s corpus is a matter of context and intertextuality. so how can we proceed in our quest? the method of concordance could help, but it would necessarily require an exceedingly long human intervention and a painstaking close reading to identify the relevant contexts of a given key term. the method of alignment would bring optimal results, but very seldom a thesis is likely to turn out as an exact quotation, so that looking for text reuse by sequence-similarity searching would hardly produce good overall returns. text mining methods would then seem the most productive. this approach comprises a wide range of algorithms and machine learning techniques and testing them by comparing their results seemed to be the preferable attitude, even though applying vector space models would look as the most promising procedure. the vector space approach comprises, in turn, a great variety of algorithms, ranging from cosine similarity, count-based, predictive, random-vector, and so-called word-embedding models. among them, the recently developed “popular software package” (recchia 2016) word2vec (mikolov et al. 2016) is widely employed for its “ease of use and state-of-the-art performance” (recchia 2016). from a methodological point of view, it may be interesting to observe that word2vec implements a prediction-based model, which relies on an “intuition,” namely that “words that share many contexts will be similar to each other.” this intuitive step may indeed look quite “hand-wavy” (goldberg and levy 2014, 5) and it has been demonstrated (levy and goldberg 2014) that “despite the apparent gulf between the inner workings of prediction-based and count-based models” what word2vec is doing, “mathematically speaking, is not much different than the sort of thing that some count-based models have been doing for awhile” (recchia 2016). but in the face of these critical assessments, the same authors have nevertheless acknowledged that this “word embedding method” still “remains superior” in some respects (levy and goldberg 2014, 2177) to traditional natural language processing methods, such as distributional semantics solutions. the decisive intuitive step seems then to endow the word2vec approach of an indisputable heuristic force that makes it look preferable to other context analysis techniques. 4. another approach worth exploring is that of the concept lab, a research project at the university of cambridge led by peter de bolla. 4 this project aims at “tracking both the history 4 the concept lab. accessed 15 march 2017. https://ccdkconceptlab.wordpress.com/. buzzetti & priani / 4 of conceptual forms and their architectures by using data derived from digital archives” (de bolla 2013, 2) and “is committed to the view that concepts are not equivalent to the meanings of the words which express them” (de bolla 2015). theories that treat concepts “as essentially in one-to-one correspondence to word senses” are therefore rejected (recchia et al. 2017, 2) and the focus is set on conceptual structures and their internal and external manifestations, namely on their “form and function” as well as on “the conceptual networks within which concepts circulate” (de bolla 2015). the “distinction between word senses and concepts” is here deemed to be an important one, because “word senses change over time,” but “a change in the frequency or lexical associations of a particular word does not necessarily entail a change in the concept” expressed in in the text (recchia et al. 2017, 3). this circumstance is particularly relevant in relation to pico’s theses, since his vocabulary, depending as it does on the need to demonstrate the genuine concordance of all philosophical positions, is not necessarily the same as that of the authors they are ascribed to. as we have seen by quoting his “preface,” pico is well aware that the expressive language he uses is a matter of choice. to cope with this problem, the cambridge research project refers to the concept through time (ctt) model that stems from the collaboration between computational linguists and cultural historians. the ctt model is based on the assumption that “the vocabulary used in the debate on a concept may change over time” and intends to “focus on the stabilization and destabilization of relational vectors between words, i.e., the emergence and disappearance of words within a subset, as well as the shifting position of words in relation to one another” (wevers et al. 2015). but does a change in the lexical associations of a given word “merit the addition” of a new concept, or “is this simply novel language for describing an old idea?” (recchia et al. 2017, 3). at the present time, work towards finding a fitting algorithm to solve this problem is still in progress. the developers of ctt point out that it “a successful system for monitoring vocabulary shifts over time should strike a balance between an adaptive strategy that responds to changes in vocabulary, and a more conservative approach that keeps the vocabulary stable” (kenter et al. 2015, 1191). in a similar vein, the researchers of the cambridge project maintain that a model should be “flexible” enough (since “words whose meanings shift away from the conceptual core should drop out”) and at the same time suitably “stable” (since “conceptual networks” should not “drift” significantly “away from the original conceptual core”) (recchia et al. 2017, 6–7). these being the options at hands, the decision was taken to test different methods, even though the vector space model—and word2vec in particular—would seem the most promising approach. 5. a first probing was conducted at the universidad nacional autonoma de méxico (unam), in collaboration with the grupo de ingeniería linguistica of the instituto de ingeniería, to locate the “sixteen conclusions” according to albert the great (farmer and pico 1998, 212– 17) in his online corpus.5 as an example, let us consider pico’s first thesis credited to albert: species intelligibiles non sunt necessariae, et eas ponere non est bonis peripateticis consentaneum. (farmer and pico 1998, 211) non-lexematic and categorematic words such as non, sunt, et, eas, est were excluded, in order to keep only those words that could help in identifying specific contexts and passages in albert’s works. the remaining words, species, intelligibiles, necessariae, ponere, bonis, 5 alberti magni e-corpus. accessed 17 march 2017. http://albertusmagnus.uwaterloo.ca. buzzetti & priani / 5 peripateticis, and consentaneum were used as a ‘bag of words’ to search the alberti magni ecorpus. the search retrieves a collection of selected paragraphs of albert’s works that can be used to make a comparison with our thesis to identify relevant contexts. we chose the cosine similarity method to compare pico’s theses with passages retrieved from albert’s e-corpus, because it is the most straightforward procedure to detect text similarities. moreover, it gives us the opportunity to compare the results we obtained, with those arrived at applying different methods. the results of our experiment are accessible online at the following address: http://www.corpus.unam.mx/tesis_latin/. so, for instance, the 15 more relevant results concerning the third thesis on albert the great can be seen through the visual interface of the system, as shown here in figure 1: — fig. 1 — this particular example is absolutely cogent to expose the difficulties depending on the use, as a term of comparison, of short sentences such as pico’s theses are, because the results we get are not decisive: in this case, the fact that 14 over the 15 highest results share the same score shows that the chosen bag of words is bound to yield a far too large number of similarity results. consequently, for our purposes, the performance of the simple cosine similarity method turns out too low. to obtain significant results other and more efficient computational models have to be employed. 6. a further step in our testing may then consist in applying topic modelling and vector-space word-embedding techniques, such as the mallet, a latent dirichlet allocation, or lda, based toolkit (mccallum 2002, graham and milligan 2012), and the word2vec packages.6 this approach may not be decisive for taking into account vocabulary drifting and for locating possible sources of pico’s theses by retrieving exact passages referred to, but it would provide 6 moody (2016) has recently proposed a mixing of the two models called lda2vec. similar models that aim at combining lda and word2vec have been presented by das et al. (2015) and batmanghelich et al. (2016). buzzetti & priani / 6 by all means reliable results in identifying recurring contexts and motifs, both in pico’s works and in his sources, that could be quite serviceable for hermeneutic purposes. the heuristic power of this method is of substantial support to any text analysis operation, such as producing linked open data, ontologies and annotation languages. in more detail, a topic modelling analysis would allow a segmentation of the corpus under scrutiny into several sections relating to specific topics. a classification of the topics is then possible and can be structured hierarchically in a rigorous way as a formal ontology, that can provide a powerful means of navigation through the entire corpus. topic modelling can then be employed as a classification tool, with results that, in the case of the french encyclopédie, have been found “consistent with […] previous machine classification experiments” (roe et al. 2014, 337) conducted on the same text (horton et al. 2009). but the topic modelling results enable us to work also within the sections of the texts that deal with a specific topic. distant and close reading can then meet and in defiance of the common opinion they can effectively show their complementarity. according to the topic modelling approach, a topic is seen as bag of co-occurring words and we can deal with them in many useful ways. the full heuristic force of the topic modelling outcomes deserves to be thoroughly exploited. to give an example, we may come back again to the comparison of topic modelling and conventional techniques in computational linguistics. the latter can be conceived of as utterly quantitative, whereas the former is better thought of as an adaptive framework, relying on anticipatory assumptions. so, for instance, in purely computational linguistics terms, a pointwise mutual information (pmi) measure— taken as a co-occurrence-based method to determine word relatedness—is seen as a function of two probabilistic events evaluating semantic similarity. this is apparently what word2vec also does, since it has been shown that its word-embedding prediction-based method “is implicitly factorizing a shifted pmi matrix—the well-known word-context pmi matrix from the word-similarity literature, shifted by a constant offset” (levy and goldberg 2014, 2177). but this actually means that the same data can be seen on the one hand as the representation of a pure matter of fact, and on the other as endowed of the anticipating power to disclose a full range of possible still unnoticed word relations. and it is precisely in exposing them that a close-reading approach comes of use. co-occurrence detection can thus be exploited to define a topic, or to produce rdf statements and populate a triple store repository, to build and increase graph databases in order to store and manage linked data, or again to introduce possible and new ontology classes. these activities can be carried out either manually, or alternatively in a semiautomatic or fully automated way. thus a controlled annotation language, obtained out of topic modelling and co-occurrence results, would possibly enable an intermediary course of action between manual and automated procedures, consisting for instance in a formalised annotation practice. 7. a promising attempt to process annotation data comes from machine learning and artificial intelligence (ai), through the application of probabilistic soft logic (psl).7 probabilistic soft logic is a recent development in the “field of statistical relational learning (srl)” (getoor and taskar 2007), a successful approach to treating “noisy, or uncertain, multi-relational data” produced by manual or automated information-extraction procedures. in our case, topic modelling results could be mapped onto rdf linked data graphs and processed through psl programmes, such as have been profitably applied to “mining” 7 probabilistic soft logic. accessed 18 march 2017. http://psl.linqs.org/. buzzetti & priani / 7 annotation graphs. their outcome produces consistent “graph summaries” quite helpful to “handle uncertainty” present within this sort of “sources of evidence about concepts.” for graph summaries can actually “group entities and relations based on similarity” and create “a graph at a higher level of abstraction” (memory et al. 2012, 75), well suited to “filter out noise” and help with “the identification of structure and meaning” in the ingested data (liu et al. 2017, a:1–2). this example can be generalised, since the output of manual annotation practices and automated information-extraction systems is usually “spurious” and “often hampered by noise.” on that account, the “statistical relational learning approach” (srl) is specifically aimed at removing undesirable “noise.” from an srl point of view, to solve that problem, is to solve “the problem of knowledge graph identification,” a process that “infers a knowledge graph” (pujara et al. 2015, 65–66) from “the noisy output of an information-extraction system” (pujara et al. 2013, 556). srl techniques “incorporate statistical information and logical dependencies” (pujara et al. 2015, 65–66) and formalise collective probabilistic reasoning in relational domains by building knowledge graphs, or “probabilistic graphical models” (bach et al. 2015, 2) of “relational data, i.e., data composed of entities and relationships connecting them” (47). the end result is a more consistent representation of the “logical dependencies” (17) between a set of entities (concepts, in our case), their attributes, and their relations, that can be handled by formal ontologies enabling further reasoning to derive conclusions not explicitly expressed in the resulting knowledge-representation data structures. probabilistic soft logic (psl) is also directly employed to develop a “programming framework for designing custom topic models,” called “latent topic networks” (ltns) that can be employed to explore “influence between scientific articles” (foulds et al. 2015, 778), or for that matter literary and philosophical texts in general. a crucial step in the development of ltns and other psl applications, consists in the use of potential functions, or semantic constraints, to handle knowledge graph identification, a process that “incorporates semantics, in the form of an ontology,” and employs “ontological constraints as weighted rules” (pujara et al. 2015, 65–66). as a matter of fact, the “semantic dependencies” between nodes in a knowledge graph (66) are expressed “in the form of a potential function or constraint, along with any necessary parameters, such as the weight of the potential” (bach et al. 2015, 13). this is done because, “if a modeler does not know how the domain behaves, the potentials should capture how it might behave, so that a learning algorithm can find weights that lead to accurate predictions” (4). learning algorithms are designed to enable inferences that comply with the assigned potential semantic constraints, so as to identify abstract probabilistic dependencies. semantic constraints are then treated as “learned prediction functions to assign a confidence score” to uncertain dependencies between concepts: virtually, they are used “as ‘hints’ to find” the “correct” dependencies, in order to establish reliable knowledge graphs (pujara et al. 2015, 66). the whole graph identification process “requires combining two disparate elements: the statistics output by an information extraction and ontological constraints derived from the semantics of the knowledge graph” (68). accordingly, it qualifies as a new development of the “mechanism known as bayesian updating,” a process in which “information is used to adjust the initial prediction (=prior belief) to the reality of the environment, resulting in a new adapted belief about the world (posterior belief)” (de ridder et al. 2013, 1). in our case, ‘the reality of the environment’ consists of textual data, but again—as we have seen in regard to the concept through time (ctt) model—by examining lexical dependencies are we dealing with concepts and ontology classes, or are we dealing with words and phrases in our texts? the point is crucial and deserves, for our purposes, a little more attention. buzzetti & priani / 8 as is well known, bayesian procedures admit of quite divergent interpretations, ranging from a strictly objectivist to a purely subjectivist view. are we trying to find what is actually there, or are we just measuring the risk of our bet? our surmise is that the two opposite points of view may even be compatible, depending on one’s intentions and on where one’s interests lie. is the face you spot in a cloud actually there, or is it just a fiction of your imagination? the latter may indeed be the case, but you would not see anything if the cloud had not been there. if the cloud is made of words, the game is open. out of metaphor, data mining applications using artificial adaptive systems (tastle 2013), such as psl models are, move from a principle derived from an analogy with natural language: “exactly as through writing a natural language can create cultural objects... in the same way the artificial sciences can create through the computer automatic models,” whose dynamics develops somewhat autonomously and independently from the observed data: “models... generate rules dynamically” in a way “similar to the kantian transcendental rules” (buscema 2011, 17-20). models can then be construed either as cultural objects, in certain respects independent from what they represent, or as objective representations of what is being described. there is both an active, so to speak, and a passive aspect in their construction. the same duality is present in the practice of textual interpretation. according to the “conversational cycle” (fig. 2) proposed by frederick parker-rhodes in his inferential semantics (1978, 16), the “thought that the speaker had intended to convey... will be processed in the listener mind, and possibly result in the elaboration of a new thought” (17). — fig. 2 — this means that the comprehension process, or for that matter the interpretation of a text, produces a model of the text not totally dependent from the actual process of its expression. it is this kind of partial autonomy from the effective state of affairs that endows the model of its significant heuristic force. the epistemological rationale behind our last observations consists in admitting “the possibility... of presenting the difference of system and environment within the system” (luhmann 1990, 12). we think it proper to the textual condition that both the model and the textual data be represented, and interpreted, within one and the same system. back to the application of psl to text analysis and natural language processing, we can now show that both close and distant reading can play similar roles in respect of quantitative as opposed to qualitative, or factual as opposed to conceptual approaches, and that they can both be regarded as complementary practices. in psl applications, input data are always assumed as strictly quantitative and purely observed ones, but they may be provided either by text mining and distant reading results, or by the outcomes of annotation and close reading practices. accordingly, both close reading and distant reading provide, in this case, factual information. on the other hand, a conceptual and interpretational step may be essential in buzzetti & priani / 9 producing the outcome of specific distantor close-reading practices. this is patent in a closereading approach, where a reflective aspect is always present, but it turns out to be so also in distant-reading data-processing approaches, as we have seen in the case of word2vec. likewise, in the application of psl to text analysis and natural language processing, an anticipatory step can be singled out in the choice of semantic constraints that identify links of potential dependence between words and phrases in a text—or, in more technical terms, between the logical atoms and predicates that constitute the nodes and edges of a probabilistic knowledge graph. 8. to sum up, what we have proposed so far is a tentative survey of possible models for a digital approach to the study of pico’s works, but whatever the methods we choose, the focus of computational analysis, be it cast on the hermeneutics of the text, of its context, or its intertextual connections, must preserve the distinctive character of that kind of critical reflection, as much conceptual as factual, which is proper of the humanities frame of mind. bibliography bach, stephen h., matthias broecheler, bert huang, and lise getoor. 2015. “hinge-loss markov random fields and probabilistic soft logic.” arxiv:1505.04406 [cs.lg] barthes, roland. 1973. “texte, théorie du.” in encyclopaedia universalis, vol. 15, 1013–17. paris: encyclopaedia universalis france. batmanghelich, kayhan n., ardavan saeedi, 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2016, edited by laura hollink, sándor darányi, albert meroño peñuela, and efstratios kontopoulos, ceur-ws, ceur workshop proceedings, vol. 1799, 2–9. aachen: ceur-ws.org. accessed 4 march 2017. http://ceur-ws.org/vol-1799/drift-alod2016_paper_1.pdf. roe, glenn. 2014. “l’étude littéraire à l’ère du numérique: du texte à l’intertexte dans les ‘digital humanities’.” in literaturwissenschaft im digitalen medienwandel, edited by christof schöch and lars schneider, [85–111]. phin beiheft, 7. accessed 4 march 2017. http://web.fu-berlin.de/phin/beiheft7/b7t06.pdf. roe, glen, clovis gladstone, and robert morrissey. 2014. “discourses and disciplines in the enlightenment: topic modeling the french encyclopédie.” in digital humanities 2014: conference abstracts, 336–38. lausanne: epfl – unil. tastle, william j. 2013. data mining applications using artificial adaptive systems. new york, ny: springer. wevers, melvin, tom kenter, and pim huijnen. 2015. “concepts through time: tracing concepts in dutch newspaper discourse (1890‒1990) using word embeddings.” in dh2015: global digital humanities. sydney: university of western sydney. accessed 15 march 2017. http://dh2015.org/abstracts/xml/wevers_melvin_concepts_through_time__tracing_ conc/wevers_melvin_concepts_through_time__tracing_concepts_i.html. mapping dante: a digital platform for the study of places in the commedia humanist studies & the digital age, 5.1 (2017) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.7264/n3mg7mxk mapping dante: a digital platform for the study of places in the commedia andrea gazzoni abstract this essay presents mapping dante, a project for the study of the geography of the divine comedy through a digital map visualizing all of the place-names mentioned in the text. first, the project background is sketched out by a concise overview of the history of the reception and visualization of dante’s geography, of the constellation of digital dante projects, and of gis literary mapping. second, specific stages and issues of mapping dante are discussed: the making of the dataset and its categories, the heterogeneity of medieval geography, the structure of the map with layers and pop-up cards. conceived as a repository of dante’s encyclopedic use of geography in the commedia, the map is also an experiment in connecting text and cartography through the possibilities offered by gis technology. by exploring different visualizations of a set layers based on textual, cultural and rhetorical categories, users can search for patterns in the distribution of dante’s geographical references, and can retrieve information relevant to each passage in which a place is mentioned. mapping dante [www.mappingdante.com] is a project in progress for the study of the geography of the divine comedy. launched in may 2016, it consists of a digital interactive map with all of the place-names mentioned in the poem, and of additional non-cartographic materials: the italian text of the commedia with links to all of its geographical references, a network visualization of the relations between individual cantos and places, and a set of charts with quantitative analyses of the same dataset on which the map is based. the constellation of digital projects about dante and his commedia is remarkably wide, certainly wider than for any other italian author, with some outcomes at the cutting edge of digital literary scholarship. so far, however, none of these projects has taken advantage of digital mapping technologies to address the full scope of the geographical imagination recalled in the poem by dante’s “cartographic impulse” (cachey, jr., “cartographic dante”, 325). the purpose of mapping dante is to fill this gap, providing readers of the commedia with a map that is complete and reliable, and also capable of posing questions about the ways in which its very content has been cartographically generated. the major encyclopedic websites on dante, given their organization of a panoply of hyperlinked resources, highlight the value of interconnectivity. the multimodal configuration typical of dante's work and of its reception require links between the modes of space and language. the digital artifact must be an extensive and intensive hypertext that points to an underlying composite encyclopedia of materials. if mapping dante moves away from that “panoply-model” that governs websites like princeton dante (hollander), digital dante (barolini) or the world of dante (parker), it does so out of apparent practical constraints on time and resources, as illustrated in section 2 of this essay. yet, making a virtue of necessity, it might be also said that the real raison d'être of mapping dante has to do with the evolution of digital scholarship from “digitization” of pre-digital materials (burdick et al. 8-9) to “knowledge design” (schnapp), that http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ humanist studies & the digital age gazzoni 5.1 (2017) 84 is, from a use of computational technologies mostly as the infrastructure of data repositories to an approach that tries to investigate the forms in which we receive, produce, and circulate knowledge. with a number of successful encyclopedic dante websites already online, it may now be time to design not as much big repositories as relatively small-scale experiments characterized by a sharper focus on the issues raised by a specific subject and on the possibilities offered by specific digital interfaces,1 gis literary mapping being a case in point. as in digital humanities at large, the making of new projects goes along with the making of new questions and the reexamination of old ones. 1. reading dante’s geography: from glosses to maps to gis fig. 1. complete extent of dante’s geographical references. source: www.mappingdante.com. a complete map of the commedia’s repertoire of places has been long overdue, for cultural and material reasons. the interest in the geography of the commedia dates back to its early commentaries (14th century) containing glosses with localization, description, and identification of places. the commedia is the first vernacular work glossed line by line as if equated to the great poems of the ancient auctores, virgil, ovid, lucan, and statius, which were commonly read also as encyclopedic repositories of knowledge in a number of fields, including geography. the quantity and extent of geographical references in the commedia covers what was believed to be the inhabited world (moore, 114-119), from scandinavia to the african desert, from the pillars of hercules to india (see fig. 1); the invention of the location of purgatory in the southern hemisphere first visited in ulysses’s last voyage (boyde 109-111) is the exception that proves the 1 see for example intertextual dante (van peteghem), a sub-project added to digital dante (barolini), dantesources (bartalesi et al.), or the twitter version of petrarch’s rerum vulgarium fragmenta (lollini and rosenberg). http://www.mappingdante.com/ humanist studies & the digital age gazzoni 5.1 (2017) 85 rule. the middle ages, however, did not visualize space as modern maps do, that is, as a dimension regulated by the uniformity of linear standard measurements (farinelli, geografia 1516): the world addressed by medieval geography, in fact, remained an ensemble of ontologically different places that did not sit on a uniform space (rouse 18), whether written as a descriptio orbis or visualized as a mappa mundi (harvey 19-38).2 the standards of uniformity, exactness and proportion typical of modern cartography are partially anticipated in the late middle ages by some of the extant regional maps from the late middle ages (harvey 82-93) and by nautical charts (harvey 39-50). as suggested by cachey, jr. (“cosmology” 238-239), dante may have integrated these two cartographic forms with the more traditional view of the descriptio or mappa mundi. fig. 2. an example of diegetic map: the cross-section of dante’s hell from lo’nferno el purgatorio e’l paradiso di dante alaghieri, the 1515 aldine edition of the commedia. the calculations of infernal mileage are derived from the study of antonio manetti (1423-1497). source: www.italnet.nd.edu/dante/text/hell.html. it was only in the age of the rise of modern cartography (between the 15th and 16th centuries) that the first maps of the commedia were produced, with representations of the realms of afterlife, particularly hell (kleiner 23-34), rather than of the “real” place-names in the poem: diegetic maps of the spatial architecture of the narrative (see fig. 2) instead of non-diegetic maps of its geographical encyclopedia. it could be argued that while the subject of diegetic maps (the immutable spaces of afterlife) was held to be stable, uniform, regular, and measurable despite some inconsistencies on dante’s part (kleiner 34-56), the potential subject of non-diegetic maps was considered imprecise, erratic, and impervious to the homogeneity of visualized space. in any event, diegetic cartography soon became a standard companion to the text of the commedia; its format has remained unchanged even after the switch to the digital. 2 see http://www.themappamundi.co.uk/ for an interactive visualization of one of the most important extant mappae mundi, the hereford map, rich with elements and places drawn from mythology, biblical stories, bestiaries, etc. http://www.italnet.nd.edu/dante/text/hell.html http://www.themappamundi.co.uk/ humanist studies & the digital age gazzoni 5.1 (2017) 86 fig. 3. non-diegetic maps of italy and tuscany from mary hensman, dante map (david nutt: london, 1982). source: www.worldofdante.org/dantemap_detail.html. it is only in the second half of the 19th century that the commedia provides the basis for non-diegetic maps, when for the sake of erudition and cultural tourism some literati in italy and europe compiled lists and descriptions of the places dante mentioned and visited (cavalieri 111122). the approach was innovative, but such illustrations could not render the full scope of dante’s geography, which reaches well beyond italy, although the italo-centric focus was certainly reasonable, for the self-evident reason that the majority of the commedia’s place-names are italian (fig. 3). this is the kind of map that we still find in the apparatus of recent editions of the poem.3 conversely, the most authoritative scholarship on the dante’s geography from one end to the other of the 20th century (moore; boyde 96-111; cachey, jr., “cosmology”) has been interested more in analyzing the overall outlines of dante’s world and cosmos than in studying how the mappa mundi virtually present in his commedia becomes concrete through the distribution of local references in the text. a complete non-diegetic map would be a support meant to make visible the geography of the commedia both in its wider cultural understanding and its particular instantiation. nevertheless, with cartographic techniques based on static printed surfaces the resulting format would simply be too large and unwieldy: materially, it should be at the same time large-scaled, to 3 see the maps in singleton’s commentary on the inferno: the course of the po river, the region of virgil’s birth, italy, and tuscany. the princeton dante has two maps of italy and tuscany, while the world of dante reproduces the maps of italy and tuscany originally in mary hensman’s 1892 compilation dante map. http://www.worldofdante.org/dantemap_detail.html humanist studies & the digital age gazzoni 5.1 (2017) 87 legibly visualize even the most densely referenced areas like tuscany, and wide enough to extend into the distant expanses of africa and asia. this is the first limitation inherent in modern cartography, insofar as it is static: on a fairly small-sized map with a fixed scale only a certain amount of legible information can be graphically inscribed; the second limitation is that mapped surfaces do not allow the inscription of much more than name and location of a geographical item, thus cutting off most of the relations between text and place-names. a possibility of reconnection has emerged with digital mapping platforms known as gis (geographic information systems). if decades ago gis was a notion familiar only to specialists such as geographers and map-makers, today this technology pervades our lives (e.g. google maps) by virtue of its versatility and inclusiveness, with a range of purposes that goes well beyond its original geo-coding function and that makes it integral to the present and the future of the “spatial turn” in the humanities (bodenhamer). gis puts control of the digital representation in the hands of a mapmaker who is capable of manipulating the data tables from which a map is generated and the way they are visually translated into a set of cartographic layers. by creating and editing connections between the “spatialized variables” in the map, a gis operator is able to produce a range of “composite mappings, visual representations, and spatial models for analysis” (travis 5). three points are most relevant to the study of how texts negotiate their references to the external world (piatti 89): a gis map is – in form and content – built up by the arrangement of multiple layers, each of them being a particular take on the dataset; it is open to variation and manipulation; it can integrate, on a cartographical basis, a huge volume of non-cartographic data. along these lines, gis mapping proves to be structurally closer to the way literary texts work (multiple perspectives, deformation/construction of realities, multimodality); even more significantly, they end up resembling the ways medieval geography worked. as scholars involved in mapping projects clearly pointed out, what we can reap from maps are patterns and conjectures rather than full-fledged interpretations, the elaboration of which will be the task of a reader/viewer and will require careful cross-analysis of text and map. (moretti 53-54, piatti 91, travis 19-20). the development of an increasing number of gis-based mapping projects attests to both the standards imposed by new technological platforms and the variations that digital humanists can elaborate in step with their field and object of study. one major distinction that emerges against this general background is one addressed before between diegetic and non-diegetic maps. diegetic maps are much used for studies in modern novels, usually qualified by realistic spatial configurations within which the narrative unfolds as if on a modern map, but they cannot properly visualize the composite ensemble of places that is frequently found, for example, in medieval literary texts; nor can diegetic maps properly visualize any geographical imagination that is not directly related to the architecture of a narrative. although not able to solve certain issues like the positioning of “imaginary” places, non-diegetic maps illustrate the geographical encyclopedia of a given corpus without trying to mirror the spatiality of a narrative that unfolds in a real (or realistic) world. obvious as this characteristic can be, it implicitly underscores the non-correspondence between page and place: how do we mentally and materially connect two dimensions apparently so heterogeneous? this may not be immediately manifest in non-diegetic mapping projects either outside the realm of literature or dealing with a corpus too large to allow in-detail examination.4 yet the question arises from the very process of map-making, and becomes central to projects based on medieval culture (wrisley, “spatial humanities”). conversant with those approaches but with a substantially smaller corpus, mapping dante investigates the connection of text and place both extensively and intensively: in an encyclopedic way, but studying only one source text. 4 see for instance the digital atlas of roman and medieval civilizations (mccormick) and visualizing medieval places (wrisley). humanist studies & the digital age gazzoni 5.1 (2017) 88 i have to note beforehand that a gis map of the places of the commedia did already exist (soars), though quite raw and hardly known, probably because it appeared on an information design blog rather than on a dedicated scholarly site: its dataset was taken from wikipedia, and the visualization consists of only three layers (places mentioned in inferno, purgatorio, and paradiso respectively), with no additional information incorporated: in this first attempt the scholarly and didactic potential of gis technology lies almost completely untapped. the only other gis dante project which i have known was part of the site mapping the medieval, and was limited to florence, being the outcome of a collaborative classroom work on florentine places referred to by dante and his fellow citizen dino compagni (hamilton). none of these gis projects was known to me until months after the launch of mapping dante, as they have not been included in any online list of digital dante resources, and are no longer functioning.5 2. project description the delimitation of the corpus of mapping dante and the definition of its purpose were first determined by the time and resources available. the plan was to have the project completed and usable in a year of intermittent work supported by an early incubation grant from the price lab for digital humanities of the university of pennsylvania. at the same time, i intended to be able to complete, manage, and update both map and website without extra funding and specialist assistance. by envisioning a low-cost and medium-scale project realistically manageable, i intended to demonstrate that even without considerable financial and technological resources, a satisfactory outcome should be possible to a scholar with average computer skills and limited access to funding. the first step of mapping dante was the choice of a map-making tool among many options. i opted for arcgis, a high-end software produced by esri, most suitable in terms of interface and versatility, with customizable pop-up cards and practically no limits to the number of layers in the map. although the very first steps of the map were created with arcgis desktop (the full version of the software, accessible through my university), then exported to arcgis online to be published, i soon decided that the job could be done directly on the online platform with a free public account: fewer functions, but still enough for the task. moreover, while the transition to the more basic online version placed some constraints on map-making, it gave me full control of the process, with a gentler learning curve. dante’s commedia has 340 geographical items, for a total of 724 mentions. before going digital, however, i had to start off with an analog exercise: close reading of the entire commedia in order to compile a dataset with the help of commentaries, repertoires, and gazetteers.6 no machine reading; what was needed, on the contrary, was annotation and description of the places and of the passages where they are mentioned. how can information be extracted from the text and made into a workable format? the integrity of the source text had to be fragmented and translated into another textuality determined by spatial models and computing protocols rather than by the sequential reading. in this respect, harley’s contention that maps are a “cultural text” (7) and that all the steps of its making, namely “selection, omission, simplification, classification” are “inherently rhetorical” (11), rings quite true, though with a caveat: maps and texts have different rules. since those imposed by gis are indeed strict, having been originally fashioned for 5 in soars’ map the base terrain on which places are pinned is not visible; hamilton’s map is no longer online so that my knowledge of it is limited to what can be read in his article. 6 the two most helpful resources have been the digital dartmouth dante project (hollander), with easy access to more than 70 commentaries, and the entries in the enciclopedia dantesca (bosco). humanist studies & the digital age gazzoni 5.1 (2017) 89 quantitative approaches, to speak qualitatively in the native language of gis is a challenge for humanists (bodenhamer), both frustrating and fascinating. gis functions with spreadsheets formatted in rows and columns, where each place is identified by latitude and longitude and optionally described by additional data. what elements shall we write into the spreadsheet, and by what categories? the cartographic infrastructure, whether analog or digital, tolerates no ambiguity (farinelli, crisi 21), since the mapping protocol relies on a rigid opposition between 0 and 1, yes and no. at this level, tertium non datur – the very opposite of a literary text. with medieval texts, the cartographer may come across a typical problem: a location cannot be indicated by exact longitude and latitude coordinates. that could be due to destruction that left scant or uncertain archeological evidence, as is the case with the pre-roman alba longa (fig. 4), the biblical sodom and gomorrah, or the castle of cunio in romagna (razed to the ground at the end of the 13th century). fig. 4. approximate location of alba longa. source: www.mappingdante.com. uncertainty could derive from the irremediably vague nature of a culture’s knowledge of a place, in terms sometimes even bordering on legend and mythology, as happens with places such as tartary or the riphaean mountains. in a literary map, however, these issues can be faced with the help of commentaries and gazetteers, and with an acceptable degree of approximation and arbitrariness. another problem is posed by places of a certain extension like regions, kingdom, and the like: drawing neatly-contoured areas (what in the gis language is a polygon) would have been a debatable choice, given the fluid and uncertain configuration of frontiers in dante’s age as well as in the classical and biblical geography to which he often refers. this is why extended areas in the map are marked only by a symbol (a radial color-gradient suggesting expansion). it is true that, if i were a cartographer this would not be an example of best practice, since on the same surface ill-defined places coexists with precise ones. yet such problems shed light on a distinctive quality of dante’s geographical imagination already stated above: heterogeneity. what are the implications of putting all the place markers on one surface, no matter if layered? as one of the tenets of westphal’s géocritique goes, “space cannot be understood except in its heterogeneity” (37): ancient and contemporary, small and vast, localized and vague, near and far, imaginary and real, experienced and known by reading or hearsay. ambiguity and complexity point to a variety of relationships between text and world, place-names and “real” referents. let us compare, for example, the acquacheta waterfall mentioned in a simile in inf. xvi (94-102) with the carthaginian zama of inf. xxxi (115-117): while the former is a precise description of a place known first-hand by dante, the latter is a faraway place famous because written accounts of roman history mention it as the location of the final battle of the second punic war. by a modern cartographical standard, acquacheta and http://www.mappingdante.com/ humanist studies & the digital age gazzoni 5.1 (2017) 90 zama should have the same quantitative and qualitative properties; alternatively, dante’s geography is multi-focal and differential, which is what the dataset records. visualizing this on the map helps scholars to understand the range of effects of the mention of places in the commedia. on the one hand, the intimacy of acquacheta augments its rhetorical function not only by providing a sonic and visual equivalent to the falling of the phlegeton river down a steep cliff, but also by reinforcing dante’s status as direct witness of things in afterlife inaccessible to the experience of his readers.7 the assumption is: “i have seen that waterfall in hell as directly and vividly as i saw that waterfall in the apennines”; not by chance, the passage is followed by the appearance of the infernal monster geryon and by a crucial address to the reader in which dante swears on the commedia itself that he did see this incredible creature.8 on the other hand, the mention of zama in virgil’s address to the giant antaeus in inferno xxxi is certainly a captatio benevolentiae that links the glory of scipio africanus’s victory with the origins of antaeus himself, but it also serves to distance him from dante and his readers.9 the giants dante sees in lower hell all belong to a sort of pre-history, either biblical (nembrot) or classical (ephialtes, briareus, antaeus), their hybris having been crushed by the forces of good; hence the inaccessibility of zama, with its aura of mythical and historical antiquity, helps us to appreciate the full extent of antaeus’ menacing otherness. at the same time, zama’s status tells us something about the speaker in this passage: the fact that virgil realistically uses references drawn from his pagan culture is a minor but significant instance of the divide that irremediably separates virgil as a character from the christian era. in short, the range of relations between the text and the places mentioned calls for an interpretation that can be effectively supported by the versatility of a gis map. the underlying data organization facilitates precise indication of spaces while also embracing the ambiguities of dante's use of these geospatial terms in the commedia. each row in the spreadsheet corresponds to a specific mention, and rows are divided by columns that separate and encapsulate pieces of information (this structure is visible in the pop-up cards describing each single mention, as in fig. 4). the row begins with the place-name in italian and english, and then continues with the data we need to locate the passage in the poem: cantica, canto, and line. the “notes” field then gives the aliases of a place if the commedia differs from today’s usage (e.g. in inf. vii, 22, charybdis instead of punta del faro for the sicilian tip of the messina straits); the same entry may signal when the location is uncertain or hypothetical, or when dante uses a municipal landmark to recall a town or a city (e.g. lateran for rome in par. xxxi, 35, ponte vecchio for florence in par. xvi, 145-146, and rue du fuarre for paris in par. x, 137). next is “place category”, that could be specific place (cities, towns, mountains, castles, and the like), 7 “come quel fiume c’ha proprio cammino / prima dal monte viso ’nver’ levante, / da la sinistra costa d’apennino, // che si chiama acquacheta suso, avante / che si divalli giù nel basso letto, / e a forlì di quel nome è vacante, // rimbomba là sovra san benedetto / de l’alpe per cadere ad una scesa / ove dovea per mille esser recetto” (inf. xvi.94-102). 8 “sempre a quell ver ch’ha faccia di menzogna / de’ l’uom chiuder le labbra fin ch’el ouote, però che sanza colpa fa vergogna; // ma qui tacer nol posso; e per le note / di questa comedìa, lettor, ti giuro, / s’elle non sien di lunga grazia vòte, // ch’i’ vidi per quell’aere grosso e scuro / venir notando una figura in suso” (inf. xvi.124-133). note also that this is the first time dante refers to the commedia as such. 9 o tu che ne la fortunata valle / che fece scipion di gloria reda, / quand’anibàl co’ suoi diede le spalle, // recasti già mille leon per preda, / e che, se fossi stato a l’alta guerra / de’ tuoi fratelli, ancor par che si creda // ch’avrebber vinto i figli de la terra; / mettine giù, e non ten vegna schifo, / dove cocito la freddura serra” (inf. xxxi.115-123). the reference to antaeus’s origins comes from lucan’s pharsalia (iv.589-594) humanist studies & the digital age gazzoni 5.1 (2017) 91 region (differentiated as small, medium and large),10 river, sea, and lake. it must be noted that while waters are in the dataset, their course and extension are not visualized on the map now because of some technical limitations imposed by the free arcgis online account (as a workaround, they will be soon visualized by specific pins). subsequently, we have the italian and english text of the stanza where the mention occurs; if you need more context, quotations are followed by a link that redirects you to a page on the website where you see the passage highlighted within the entire italian text of its canto. then comes the speaker who mentions a place: there are 80 of them, and their list ordered by frequency can be seen on the chart section of the website: 173 occurrences for dantenarrator, 61 for virgil, 42 for cacciaguida, and surprisingly only 39 for dante-character. most notably, cacciaguida speaks only in 3 cantos, par. xv-xvii; beatrice, dante’s guide from purg. xxx to par. xxxiii, ranks only tenth with 14 mentions. this is a good example of how a geographical approach can enhance our understanding of the commedia: as eloquently indicated by the figures, while beatrice leads dante in his cosmico-theological transcending of the limitation of the earthly world and its geography, in the middle of paradiso cacciaguida brings dante back to the eminenty concrete geographical dimension of his origin, life and mission. these two tensions are complementary, and can be further explored by means of quantitative and qualitative analysis. the following categories in the data sheet are filled by “yes” or a blank, and can be grouped in two sets. one i would call historico-cultural, and signals if a place was visited by dante,11 and if it was mentioned as classical, mythological, and biblical, a tripartition not perfect but handy for the description of the diverse status of places.12 the other group describes rhetorical features of how a place is referred to in a passage: explicitly or by periphrasis, as an adjective, as part of a simile, and by direct speech. the map translates these categories into pop-up cards, one for each mention of a place, but first and foremost it plots a number of them into an extensive view of superimposed layers. the layers’ list, shown in a window on the right side of the map, is as follows: two frequency layers (one with scaled pins, the other as a heat map: the warmer the color the more mentioned an area is, see fig.5); four layers per cantica, (inferno, purgatorio, and paradiso being subdivided into specific places, small regions, medium regions, and large regions); four historico-cultural layers (visited by dante, classical, mythological, biblical), four rhetorical layers (explicit, by periphrasis, as an adjective, in a simile, by direct speech). within this structure, users can toggle layers on and off to customize visualization, and can also zoom in and out to analyze place distribution at different scales. by default, the map shows only the layers based on inferno, purgatorio, and paradiso. at the most global view (see fig. 5), this really highlights how the commedia is both a mediterranean text and a north-central italian one. at a closer view and with the aid of layer selection, more specific distributions of place-names can be studied. 10 of course, this partition had to be done with a fair degree of approximation. 11 to determine this value in the spreadsheet, my main reference was inglese’s recent biography of dante. 12 this classification is similar to the categories of the search tool of the world of dante website (parker), where places are arranged by “nature” (mythical or historical) and “source” (biblical, classical, medieval). humanist studies & the digital age gazzoni 5.1 (2017) 92 fig. 5. the mediterranean region as a heat map. the distinction between warm and cool areas becomes more articulate as we zoom in. source: www.mappingdante.com. a dataset constructed by close reading has thus been turned into a geo-visualization that has dismembered its source text and placed it on a surface governed by the partially incompatible protocol of cartography. yet through gis technology we can reconnect the cartographical with the textual, insofar as we can write elements of the poem into the map through layers, pop-up cards, and links. the result is a map of relations: the places visualized recompose a network that branches off in two directions: into both text and the world. the non-cartographic visualizations present in the mapping dante website have precisely this goal: to underscore that a map is a provisional artifact, as the information it stores lies open to further investigations with diverse approaches. the same bundle of relations inscribed into the dataset can thus be transformed in ways that create new points of entry into the commedia. a visual analysis of the connections between places and cantos in an interactive graph links canti according to places in common or types of places. these links suggest pathways of analysis through the poem, much like vocabulary, metaphor, characters, or historical sources have offered for previous scholarship (see fig. 6). http://www.mappingdante.com/ humanist studies & the digital age gazzoni 5.1 (2017) 93 fig. 6. interactive network visualization of the relation between cantos and place-names. the network was built with gephi and then web-exported with sigmajs. source: www.mappingdante.com/network/index.html. similarly, quantitative analysis (in charts, see fig. 7) brings to light places that are spatially intensive while, by the very absence of tall bars in the chart below, point to moments in each cantica that are not explicitly connected to diegetical or non-diegetical spaces. these patterns offer a rich site of new investigation into dante's poetics and “cartographic impulse” (cachey, 325). http://www.mappingdante.com/ humanist studies & the digital age gazzoni 5.1 (2017) 94 fig. 7. chart with number of place mentioned in each canto of the commedia. built with tableau public. source: www.mappingdante.com/charts/#placespercanto. the heterogeneity embraced by those relations oscillates between effacement, dictated by the logic of cartography, and emergence, allowed by the retrieval of textual elements and patterns on the map. we cannot do without the interface of modern cartography and its ontologically uniform surface; yet we also seek to recover that type of geographical and textual knowledge that was first displayed in line-by-line glossing, and that with the advent of modern maps was pushed out of view. conclusion the potential of this type of map can be summarized in two major points: 1) it is a textual repertoire cartographically arranged, hence allowing users to find information on passages of the poem from a cartographical perspective; 2) it is a tool that, while not providing new interpretations by itself, enable users to observe patterns in the interrelation of geography and poetry, patterns that might not have been as evident without a cartographic view. therefore, mapping dante partakes of both epistemological functions of literary maps: illustration of elements already at hand in the text, and interpretation of what would be otherwise invisible or elusive (piatti 99). such is indeed the double duty that gis maps can do as mobile and tentative interfaces between text and world. by creating maps that make this condition manifest since they do not look like copies or mirrors of either world or text, we may get closer to medieval geography – not as if we were its contemporaries but from the inevitable vantage point of our own sense of geography, partly still subject to the paradigm of modern maps, partly exposed to the uncertainty and intricacy of post-modern spaces and places. literary mapping is a work-inprogress that paradoxically aspire to break free from the cartographical rules it depends on, either analog or digital; so, we must be ready to question technologies and tool, just like medieval mapmakers who were aware that maps are plastic artifacts for the visualization and manipulation of a culture’s relation with its world. “in depicting the world, medieval mapmakers tried to show the significance of places as well as their location” (edson 164). to the restoration and reassessment of this significance, which is the implicit or explicit goal of any undertaking in digital literary cartography, mapping dante as a prototype tries to give its contribution. new materials and features will be added to both map and website in order to expand and intensify the experience of dante’s geography as a field of interconnectedness. works cited alighieri, dante. the divine comedy. ed. charles s. singleton. 6 vols. princeton: princeton university press, 1970-1975. print. barolini, teodolinda, ed. digital dante [new version], columbia university, 2014. web 17 feb. 2017. <http://digitaldante.columbia.edu>. bartalesi, valentina, et al. "dantesources: a digital library to study dante alighieri's primary sources". umanistica digitale 1 (2017): 119-128. <https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/article/view/7250/7007>. http://www.mappingdante.com/ http://digitaldante.columbia.edu/ https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/article/view/7250/7007 humanist studies & the digital age gazzoni 5.1 (2017) 95 bodenhamer, david j. “the potential of spatial humanities.” the spatial humanities: gis and the future of humanities scholarship. david j. bodenhamer et al., eds. bloomington: indiana university press, 2010. 14-30. print. bosco, umberto, ed. enciclopedia dantesca. 6 vols. roma: istituto della enciclopedia italiana, 19701978. print. boyde, patrick. dante philomytes and philosopher: man in the cosmos. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1983. print. burdick, anne, et al. digital humanities. cambridge: mit press, 2012. print. cachey, theodore j., jr. “cartographic dante.” italica 87:3 (2010): 325-354. print. ---. “cosmology, geography, and cartography.” dante in context. eds. zygmunt g. barański and lino pertile. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2015. 221-240. print. cavalieri, raffaella. il viaggio dantesco: viaggiatori dell’ottocento sulle orme di dante. torino: robin edizioni, 2006. print. edson, evelyn. mapping time and place: how medieval mapmakers viewed the world. london: british library, 1997. print. hollander, robert, ed. dartmouth dante project, dartmouth college, 1988. web. feb. 17 2017. <dante.dartmouth.edu>. ---. princeton dante project, princeton university, 1999. web. 17 feb. 2017. <etcweb.princeton.edu/dante/index.html>. farinelli, franco. la crisi della ragion cartografica. torino: einaudi, 2009. print. ---. geografia. un’introduzione ai modelli del mondo. torino: einaudi, 2003. print. hamilton, louis. “virtual cities: gis as a tool for the analysis of dante’s commedia.” pedagogy 13:1 (2013): 115-123. print. harley, j. b. “deconstructing the map.” cartographica 26:2 (1989): 1-20. print. harvey, p. d. medieval maps. toronto: university of toronto press, 1991. print. inglese, giorgio. vita di dante. una biografia possibile. roma: carocci, 2015. print. lollini, massimo, and rebecca rosenberg. “e-philology and twitterature”. humanist studies & the digital age 4 (2015): 116-163. web. 20 sept. 2017. http://journals.oregondigital.org/index.php/hsda/article/view/3634. moore, edward. “the geography of dante.” studies in dante: third series. oxford: clarendon press, 1903. 109-143. print. moretti, franco. graphs, maps, trees: abstract models for literary history. london: verso, 2005. print. http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://etcweb.princeton.edu/dante/index.html http://journals.oregondigital.org/index.php/hsda/article/view/3634 humanist studies & the digital age gazzoni 5.1 (2017) 96 parker, deborah, ed. the world of dante, university of virginia, 1997. web. 17 feb. 2017. <www.worldofdante.org>. piatti, barbara. “mapping fiction: the theories, tools and potential of literary cartography.” literary mapping in the digital age. eds. david cooper, christopher donaldson and patricia murrieta-flores. new york: routledge, 2016. 88-101. print. rouse, robert allen. “what lies between? thinking through medieval narrative spatiality.” literary cartographies: spatiality, representation and narrative. ed. robert t. tally jr. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2014. 13-29. print. schnapp, jeffrey t. “knowledge design. incubating new knowledge forms/genres/spaces in the laboratory of digital humanities”. herrenhausen conference, 5-7 december 2013, hanover. keynote address. web. 20 sept 2017. <https://www.volkswagenstiftung.de/uploads/media/hh_lectures_schnapp_01.pdf>. soars, marco. “la mappa divina: tutti i luoghi citati da dante.” cartesiani, 30 oct., 2013. web. 17 feb. 2017. <www.cartesiani.it/mappa-divina>. travis, charles b. abstract machines: humanities gis. new york: esri press, 2015. print. van peteghem, julie. “digital readers of allusive texts: ovidian intertextuality in the commedia and the digital concordance on intertextual dante.” humanist studies & the digital age 4:1 (2015): 39-59. web. 17 feb 2017. <http://journals.oregondigital.org/index.php/hsda/article/view/3584/3493>. westphal, bertrand. geocriticism: real and fictional spaces. transl. robert t. tally, jr. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2011. print. wrisley, david joseph. “spatial humanities: an agenda for pre-modern research.” porphyra 22 (2014): 96-107. web. 17 feb, 2017. <www.porphyra.it/porphyra22.pdf>. wrisley, david joseph, ed. visualizing medieval places, 2013. web. 17 feb. 2017. <vmp.djwrisley.com>. http://www.worldofdante.org/ https://www.volkswagenstiftung.de/uploads/media/hh_lectures_schnapp_01.pdf http://www.cartesiani.it/mappa-divina http://journals.oregondigital.org/index.php/hsda/article/view/3584/3493 http://www.porphyra.it/porphyra22.pdf http://vmp.djwrisley.com/ humanist studies & the digital age, 6.1 (2019) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.6.1.4 59 noisemakers! putting the analog in digital humanities serena ferrando & mark wardecker abstract: noisefest! is an interactive, multisensory experience centered around a small maine town and rooted in the sounds and noise of its streets. comprising a virtual reality tour, soundwalks and remixes, a 2d laser cut geographical map with arduino controllers, and a futuristic noise intoner, one of the objectives of this collaborative, transdisciplinary, and theory-based project is to create concrete opportunities for students to participate in the “real” world and engage with the materiality of noise and its manifestations by interacting with the soundscape through novel, interactive, and multisensory practices. noisefest! is also an example of how one can creatively and artistically extend the reach of the digital humanities beyond the borders of academia and into the public realm. digital humanities methods, approaches, and tools allow us to explore and present concepts in multimedia formats, but they can also aid us in the actual binding of our intellectual, academic lives to the material reality around us. building analog artifacts through digital humanities can be the culmination of a string of theoretical reflections on a given concept. if we take, for example, the concept of “noise”, which is a major component of the modern industrial soundscape and the contemporary music scene and is central to a large corpus of scholarly writing, the application of digital tools and methods can be the vessel through which to acquire and develop a heightened understanding of the physical properties of noise and its abstract derivations such as the propagation of sound waves through different spaces and mediums, how infrasound inaudible to human ears affects the body, or how applied filters can modify different areas of the audio frequency spectrum. software such as max for live, arduino, and flatfab – to name a few – that are designed to create objects and experiences and thus occupy the membranic space between the digital realm and reality, can also facilitate the absorption as well as the transmission of knowledge from an academic environment to larger communities outside academia. as diane jakacki and katherine faull observe in doing digital humanities. practice, training, research, alan liu’s tripartite methodology of “practice, discovery, community” (that is central to the practice of digital humanities) comprises both critical thinking and critical doing (359). when the theoretical analysis of either data or literary, artistic, and cultural phenomena is supplemented by experiential investigation, the discovery of new knowledge is not only enhanced but also accompanied by the production of objects that will also serve the purpose of disseminating such knowledge. therefore, the products that are the concrete outcomes of digital humanistic inquiry can provide abundant opportunities to reach beyond the theory and beyond the walls of academia to engage with the wider public. http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ humanist studies & the digital age ferrando & wardecker 6.1 (2019) 60 noisefest! is a case in point. an interactive, multisensory experience, noisefest! is centered around the town of waterville, maine, where colby college is located. rooted in the sounds and noise of main street, it comprises a virtual reality tour of the town, various soundwalks and remixes, a 2d laser cut geographical map with arduino controllers, and a futuristic noise intoner.1 collaborative, transdisciplinary, and rooted in theory (russolo, varèse, adorno, cage, schafer, attali, nyman, pasnau, westerkamp, and many others), the ramifications of this project serve the purpose of participating in the “real” world by engaging with the materiality of noise and its manifestations by interacting with the soundscape through novel, interactive, and multisensory practices. on weekly google classroom blog posts and in class, students discussed excerpts from theodor adorno. quasi una fantasia; r. murray schafer. the soundscape; luigi russolo. the art of noises; jacques attali, noise. the political economy of music; robert pasnau. “what is sound?”; edgar varèse and chou wen-chung. “the liberation of sound”; paul hegarty. noise/music. a history; michael nyman. experimental music. cage and beyond; thom holmes. electronic and experimental music. technology, music, and culture; maria maddalena novati and john dack. the studio di fonologia. a musical journey 1954-2012; eduard hanslick. on the musically beautiful; paul d. miller. sound unbound; c. lane and a. carlyle. in the field. the art of field recording; and bernie krause. the great animal orchestra. these readings were for students an introduction to the field of sound and noise studies, and this theoretical knowledge was manifested in the digital/analog noise artifacts of their own creation.2 this article, however, focuses primarily on the section of the lab where students built hybrid analog/digital sound/noise artifacts with the intention to promote new, multisensory ways of experiencing and understanding our shared soundscape. the noisefest! artifacts imitate and reproduce urban noise while also highlighting the musical potentialities inherent in the city that russolo described in the art of noises over a century ago.3 as revealed by cage’s experimental pieces such as 4’33” where he draws attention to the fact that what we call silence is in reality the negation of any type of noise that does not fit a culturally and historically situated definition of music, the mimetic features of the noisefest! instruments serve the purpose of capturing the life of the environment and reminding us that the potential for a “new” music (nonrepresentational and in the form of “unregimented sound” to use theodor adorno’s words) is all around us (254). 1 the reader is invited to visit the noisemakers! website for photos, videos, and sound clips of the noise artifacts. as per hildegard westerkamp’s definition, a “soundwalk is any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment.” (1) noisefest! also featured a talk by adi snir, director of the harvard group for new music at harvard university, titled “noise is a matter of listening.” the talk focused on the openness of snir’s scores, which utilizes the space between performers and composer to promote a greater engagement with the “real” of the performance and tie back to his way of conceiving noise and sound. 2 for example, inspired by attali’s work, two students’ soundwalk and accompanying 2d printed artwork explored the environmental politics inherent to increased noise levels when the dam on a local river remained in place even when the paper mill that it fed went out of business and closed permanently. 3 another entirely digital project was the soundwalk in virtual reality using the mule works innovation lab’s htc vive headset. in addition to recording ambient sounds, students also used a samsung gear 360 camera to capture 360 degree videos of the locations they visited. these were then imported into the unity game engine software running on an alienware gaming pc in the lab. with unity’s built-in 3d sound settings, the students were able to spatialize the sounds differently at certain points so that users would hear different things as they turned their heads while watching the videos. we then wrote a c# script for the simulation that would let users navigate from one image to the next with the vive controllers. at the more analog end of the spectrum was an actual noise intoner constructed with pieces that were cut with a laser cutter and assembled in a sculptors’ studio. humanist studies & the digital age ferrando & wardecker 6.1 (2019) 61 colby college’s center for the arts and humanities sponsors several humanities labs every year, which give students a chance to do more involved hands-on work with the subjects they are studying, such as going on field trips to work with collections at cultural institutions or creating digital projects. noisefest! originates from a digital humanities lab titled noisemakers! tracing the origins of modern music in italy that explores different perspectives on noise emerging from the fields of music, ecocriticism, philosophy, phenomenology, and technology and translates them into digital, analog, or hybrid digitalanalog artifacts that facilitate the reproduction and the physical experience of noise. michael nyman reminds us of cage’s distinction between “old” and new (experimental) music as the difference between communication and perception (23). the performers of experimental music increasingly take on the role of perceivers who must pay close attention to the sounds around them in order to respond to them and adjust their playing. they are at once players and audience.4 noisefest! creates a similar situation where the emphasis of the musical experience instead of residing in the need to convey an artistic message lies in the participation in a shared auditory experience that is more firmly rooted in life than in music or art as they are traditionally perceived. emphasis is placed on the value of the process of extracting sound from a city rather than on the results of such operation.5 preparation for noisefest! was an essential part of the students’ lab experience, and they began their hands-on work by forming groups to create soundwalks of waterville and inspired by rule six in cage and kent’s “ten rules for students and teachers,” “nothing is a mistake. there’s no win and no fail. there’s only make.” the guidelines were extremely simple: students were free to record anything as long as it was in waterville. for these soundwalks, the students used marantz portable audio recorders to record ambient noise at various locations in town. they then downloaded the open source audio editor, audacity, and in a class session, learned to use it to edit and enhance the audio files they wanted to feature in their projects. for their soundwalks, their goal was to create digital maps with their laptops on which the locations of their recordings would be highlighted. using midi controllers connected to their laptops, students tested how users would be able to play and manipulate loops of the sounds corresponding to each map location. in this way, the aural maps of the soundwalks would function as electronic musical instruments. the musical instrument digital interface standard (midi) is a communications protocol that allows electronic instruments, like synthesizers and samplers, and computers to interface with each other. for the soundwalks, we decided to use novation launch control midi controllers, because of their simplicity and popularity (fig. 1). to create the playable maps, we chose cycling ‘74’s max/msp software. max is rather unusual in that it is really a visual programming language that mimics the type of patching that was done with early modular analog musical equipment and various connecting cords and cables. a max program is actually called a “patch,” and to create one, the programmer adds and, using virtual “patch cords,” connects a variety of max “modules,” such as a digital audio player or a buffer for storing a sound file. the benefit to using max is that it works with a variety of audiovisual media. more specifically, max allowed the students to upload an image file of 4 see cage’s concept of auditory disponibilité or being open to the sounds of the world, “hear what there is to hear, rather than what [one] thinks there’s going to be to hear” (52). 5 this of course does not exclude the value of this operation for the user, who is also a participant in the shared auditory experience by being able to manipulate sounds extracted from the city but not crystallized in a final composition. in this case, the involvement and the agency of the user are heightened in comparison to those of the traditional passive listener. humanist studies & the digital age ferrando & wardecker 6.1 (2019) 62 a waterville map and then use this as a canvas in what it calls “presentation mode,” a curated view of what the programmer wants to display of a particular patch. figure 1. novation launch control midi controller. given its complexity, we did not expect the students to become experts at max programming and decided to create a basic patch they could download that would quickly get them started with using their launchpad controllers to play their found sounds.6 this patch was mapped to the midi outputs of the first column of the launch control. a press of the button would start or stop a loop of a sound file, and turning the potentiometers (pots or knobs) would smoothly alter the speed at which the loop played and its pitch (fig. 2). when the students were introduced to max, we talked them through how to add one of their own sound files to the patch’s buffer object and then walked them through how the patch worked. though we decided that loop speed and pitch would be good basic interactions, we also showed them how to substitute other objects if they wanted to explore max a bit more. from this point, they could duplicate the objects in the patch and keep adding more sounds to be played with the controller’s other seven buttons and fourteen pots. after they were comfortable with how the patch worked, we showed them how to geo-locate their sounds in max/msp by adding an image of a map to the patch and then assigning or adding objects to max’s “presentation mode” view. this view allows the programmer to control what a viewer sees of a patch on a monitor or screen, and in 6 all of the code and its accompanying documentation for these projects is available at gihhub: https://github.com/academicits/noisemakers/. https://github.com/academicits/noisemakers/ humanist studies & the digital age ferrando & wardecker 6.1 (2019) 63 this case, it allowed the students to put their soundscapes of waterville’s main street at a user’s fingertips. by interacting with the sound clips in max and manipulating them in real time, launching certain clips and stopping others, the user becomes a dj with the power to “remix” the town in original ways and revisit a familiar landscape with new eyes and ears (fig. 3). figure 2. max interface with the basic patch. humanist studies & the digital age ferrando & wardecker 6.1 (2019) 64 figure 3. max sound map in “presentation mode.” the embedding of analog features in a digital artifact such as a max sound map, like the one in fig. 3, creates great terrain for the mind to engage with the materiality of the senses, and makes it thus a valuable instrument for both the creators and the users. the process of building such an instrument requires a knowledge of the necessary software and hardware to create and operate it, a great dose of creativity to make it as engaging and as efficient as possible, and an exploration of the theoretical discourse surrounding the topic of noise.7 it also requires the awareness that building a digital object based in reality that will become part of the public domain will reach an audience that may not be digitally-inclined or tech-savvy. the use of analog tools and materials to complement and enhance the digital component therefore becomes crucial. for this reason, noisefest! features an interactive map with arduino hardware that is the result of a combination of digital and analog media. it is, in fact, a digital sound machine encased in an analog shell where knobs that control electrical voltages are connected via soldered wires to a circuit board that converts their analog signal to a digital one (fig.4). 7 this exploration included reflections on the definition of noise, its physical properties, its integration into modern and contemporary musical compositions, as well as the listeners’ ability to participate actively in the experience of noise, and the socio-political implications of noise such as the power of enharmonics (or notes that have smaller intervals than a semitone) to disrupts the established music system and related cultural hierarchies. humanist studies & the digital age ferrando & wardecker 6.1 (2019) 65 figure 4. interactive map combining digital and analog media. that signal is then passed to a laptop running max/msp. having already guided students through creating their max soundscapes, we encouraged a team of students to design and build an actual wooden map that would be playable in much the same way. since mounting a manufactured midi controller, like a launch control, into a map would severely limit the look and feel of the project, we decided to see if we could build our own controller with an arduino microcontroller board, which would allow us to place pots or buttons at any location. we started by trying to replicate the button and two pots of a single launch control column. using a breadboard for prototyping, we wired a button and a resistor to a digital input and two pots to analog inputs on the arduino uno board (fig. 5). we then wrote a short c++ program to make these output the appropriate midi messages. since the arduino had to connect to a computer using a usb cable, instead of a dedicated, five-pin midi cable, we used the open source software, hairless midi, as a bridge to get the midi output from the arduino to max via usb (fig. 6). humanist studies & the digital age ferrando & wardecker 6.1 (2019) 66 figure 5. arduino uno board. figure 6. hairless midi software bridges output from the arduino board. with a working midi controller prototype, we then discussed with the students the locations that they wanted to map and the kinds of interactions they would like to include in their project. we decided to keep the two pots from the basic patch that control the speed and pitch of the looped humanist studies & the digital age ferrando & wardecker 6.1 (2019) 67 audio file but felt that we should replace the button that starts the loop with a pot that controls volume. that would allow the sound to play continuously and give users more control of the mix while “playing” the map. to represent the space depicted by the map, we spatialized the sounds by adding a monaural reverb and panning module to each loop in the max patch. these were then adjusted so that sounds farther away from the listener (i.e., closer to the north of the map) were “wetter,” or had more reverb applied to them, and the panning, or stereo positioning, of each sound was determined by how far east or west the location was on the map. the students then designed the map of waterville in adobe photoshop, and the jpeg file they created was imported into retinaengrave software. the plywood map was cut and etched with a full spectrum laser cutter in colby college’s mule works innovation lab. from there, the students brought the wooden map to sculptor, bradley borthwick’s, campus studio to build a frame for it and drill the necessary holes for the pots. finally, the students were taught how to solder and began wiring the pots to the arduino controller.8 at this point, we encountered a few difficulties. the map featured eight different waterville locations, such as the public library, city hall, and a popular coffee house. since each of these locations required three pots, we needed twenty-four analog input pins for our controller. since even the largest arduino board, the mega, only has sixteen analog inputs, we had to use multiplexer (mux) boards to add additional input pins for the pots. these could then be combined into a single output from the mux board and wired into a single input on the arduino. the code for the arduino program had to be adapted to this new arrangement. in the end, we did get the map working, and the final result was an impressive looking and sounding instrument.9 the traditional look of the board makes it quite approachable and enticing even to the non-technologically-inclined user, and hides the seventy-two wires that are soldered to the knobs and connected to the arduino board. compared to a novation midi controller, this large semi-analog board presents a much warmer feel and appears more immediately playable than its sleek counterpart and, for this reason, consistently garners greater interest and use. the skills required to develop noise-based artifacts such as the laser-cut arduino-controlled map comprise the ability to apply noise and sound theory to the ideation of concrete objects, as well as the ability to find creative solutions to practical problems such as determining the optimal scale of the waterville map for laser cutting or the placement of the knobs on the board.10 such skills also extend to using a drill and a soldering kit, which are not among the traditional goals of the liberal arts education offered at colby but that nevertheless engage the brain and the body in equal measure and are transportable to various fields of work and research such as architecture, art, music, and engineering. the transportability of these skills to a variety of disciplines is mirrored in that of the digital-analog noise artifacts that they inform and that can be brought to a museum, a creative space, 8 special thanks to louisa baum, anikka schliesmann, and olivia wandres for their dedication to the project, and to tim stonesifer from colby information technology services for the technical support and expertise that he provided. many thanks also to assistant professor of art, bradley borthwick, for sharing his knowledge and putting his sculpture studio and its tools at our disposal. 9 there were a few pots that did not work due to either soldering or wiring errors. one thing we learned was that it is critical to agree on a color scheme for wiring and to stick to it. that makes troubleshooting bad connections much easier. 10 while building the noise instruments, students pondered what the purpose of a soundwalk was, the capacity that noise has more than music to carry non-static, mutable message, and how the listener plays an active role in the creation of a sound experience. humanist studies & the digital age ferrando & wardecker 6.1 (2019) 68 a library, or a concert hall where they can engage with the public without requiring any mediation, theoretical explanations, or technical expertise. noisefest! captures the distinctive sounds and noise of main street in waterville at a specific historical time and provides both creators and users with the opportunity to be completely immersed in the physicality of the present and interact with it in creative and experiential ways. while building their noise artifacts, students reflected on the past and looked to the future as they listened, analyzed, and critiqued earlyand mid-twentieth-century noise compositions and sound recordings and learned to situate sound and noise along geo-temporal coordinates. this helped them follow and understand the process of inclusion of urban and anthropogenic noise into the modern musical landscape and inspired their creative work. furthermore, the ability to portray and “play” the city of waterville as a musical instrument is a way of drawing attention to the city as a multilayered sound system and away from the unreceptive and unresponsive act of being passively subjected to the cacophony of urban noise. embodying the convergence of the concrete auditory substance of the world with theoretical meditations on noise, such as cage’s suggestion that music is not about understanding but about awareness, noisefest! is an example of how one can creatively and artistically extend the reach of the digital humanities into the field of sound and noise studies beyond the borders of academia and into the public realm. works cited adorno, theodor. quasi una fantasia. essays on modern music. 1963. verso, 2011. berio, luciano, roberto leydi, and bruno maderna. “portrait of a city.” 1954, http://fonologia.lim.di.unimi.it/brani_scheda.php?id=493&phpsessid=bp74u779knb39hlqu vkg159rl2. accessed 12 october 2019. cage, john, and corita kent. “ten rules for students and teachers.” open culture: the best free cultural and educational media on the web, www.openculture.com/2018/07/10-rules-for-studentsand-teachers.html. accessed 12 october 2019. jakacki, diane, and katherine faull. “doing dh in the classroom: transforming the humanities curriculum through digital engagement.” doing digital humanities: practice training, research, edited by constance crompton, richard j. lane, and ray siemens, taylor and francis, 2016, pp. 358-380. nyman, michael. experimental music. cage and beyond. 1999. cambridge university press, 2010. perloff, marjorie, and charles junkermann. john cage. composed in america. the university of chicago press, 1994. russolo, luigi. the art of noises. futurist manifesto. 1913. pendragon press, 1986. ---. “the awakening of a city.” musica futurista: the art of noises. salon ltmcd 2401. 2006. westerkamp, hildegard. “soundwalking.” sound heritage. 1974. vol. 3, no. 4, 2001, https://www.sfu.ca/~westerka/writings%20page/articles%20pages/soundwalking.html. accessed 12 october 2019. noisemakers! putting the analog in digital humanities serena ferrando & mark wardecker works cited humanist studies & the digital age, 7.1 (2022) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda/7.1.8 1 just because we can doesn’t mean we should: on knowing and protecting data produced by the jewish consumptives’ relief society jack maness and kim pham abstract: a recent project at the university of denver libraries used handwritten text recognition (htr) software to create transcriptions of records from the jewish consumptives’ relief society (jcrs), a tuberculosis sanatorium located in denver, colorado from 1904 to 1954. among a great many other potential uses, these typeand hand-written records give insight into the human experience of disease and epidemic, its treatment, its effect on cultures, and of jewish immigration to and early life in the american west. our intent is to provide these transcripts as data so the text may be computationally analyzed, pursuant to a larger effort in developing capacity in services and infrastructure to support digital humanities as a library, and to contribute to the emerging htr ecosystem in archival work. just because we can, however, doesn’t always mean we should: the realities of publishing large datasets online that contain medical and personal histories of potentially vulnerable people and communities introduce serious ethical considerations. this paper both underscores the value of htr and frames ethical considerations related to protecting data derived from it. it suggests a terms-of-use intervention perhaps valuable to similar projects, one that balances meeting the research needs of digital scholars with the care and respect of persons, their communities, and inheritors, whose lives produced the very data now valuable to those researchers. handwritten text recognition technology and archival research historically, archival research has been a time-intensive endeavor. the sheer volume of manuscripts, photographs and other objects and artifacts in libraries, archives and museums is great enough to present significant challenges to many researchers. the challenge is compounded, of course, by the need to physically access materials that have never been digitized and rendered in machine-readable formats. in addition, limited resources in archival organizations mean many physical archives are only processed with minimal descriptive metadata: one might find, for example, from electronic records that the papers of a certain person or organization are in a particular archive, or even that the papers from some decade or another are in exact boxes, but frequently one may not know from these electronic records precisely what papers are in what boxes until reviewing them, much less what is written in those papers, or by whom. the result is that tedious and costly physical analysis remains the only access point to many archival materials. the inherent and long-standing reality of difficulty in access to physical archives calls for the development of new technologies that ease access and make possible new forms of computational analysis of those documents. in some scientific disciplines these materials are considered “heritage,” “dark,” or “analog” data that are “at risk” and in need of “rescuing” (interna’tl science council). projects that make such data more readily available in the digital age are even considered for an international award in geoscience research http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ humanist studies & the digital age maness and pham 7.1 2022 2 (internat’l earth data alliance). in all disciplines, the humanities included, untold discoveries await such projects and the technologies and infrastructures required by them, discoveries that necessitate physical documents not only be made electronic, but also that their contents, in the case of written language, be made readable by machines. such technical innovation has been underway for more than a generation. for many decades, primarily type-written documents have been “rescued,” as it were, using optical-character-recognition (ocr). the history of ocr, in fact, can be understood as having origins two centuries ago in work to aid the visuallyimpaired, and that “by the end of the second decade of the 19 th century . . . experimentation with ocr had convincingly demonstrated the feasibility of optically scanning printed materials, converting that material into electronic code signals, and subsequently encoding the electronic code signals” (schantz 3). today, because large volumes of printed material have been, simply stated as a verb, “ocr’d,” the technology “pervades contemporary humanities research and teaching . . . [and] make[s] it easy to forget that we are all engaged in relatively sophisticated modes of machine reading each time we use a digital archive” (cordell and smith 9). ocr is an imperfect technology, however, standards for its implementation are lacking, and its very improvement introduces opportunities for ocr’d documents to be reprocessed, yielding better and new machine-readable characters. indeed, as cordell and smith conclude in their report, ocr improvement warrants collective research and standardization, due to its imperfection but also its nearly ubiquitous presence in the online services of libraries, archives, and museums. researchers do not currently enjoy the ubiquity of machine reading for handwritten textual materials, however, primarily for the obvious reason: handwriting is more varied and less standardized than machinetyped language, and therefore more difficult to encode into machine-readable formats. ocr technology can and does encode some handwritten text, but the nature of handwriting requires yet more sophisticated technologies that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning, allowing algorithms to generalize character recognition enough that it can “read” across hands, but not generalize so much that it confuses characters and languages to the point of uselessness. deploying htr across a variety of archival infrastructures would vastly improve access to archival information and would also limit the need for human intervention to transcribe handwritten materials. human transcription is a costly and sometimes ethically fraught process in its own right, including the use of unpaid labor, lack of diversity in volunteers, and potential reinforcement of the continued genderization of library, archival, and museum work (orlowitz; mayer). while human transcription most certainly introduces elements of bias and other problematic issues, it is also vitally important to note that machine transcription does not escape them. htr relies in some cases on “the imposition of a uniform transcription scheme [that] obscures regional, temporal, and ethnic varieties [of a language]. . . and creates an artificially homogeneous outlook,” because ultimately machine facilitated transcription “[relies] on the language data provided by the transcriber [which] reproduce[s] the transcriber’s linguistic bias in the output” (kirmizialtinx and wrisley 14). in addition to homogenizing languages and dialects, there is also a very basic availability bias inherenet in automated transcription, as machines can only trascribe characters and languages upon which they have been trained: it is somewhat safe to presume the htr ecosystem being developed is almost certainly biased toward english and other european languages, for example. nevertheless, htr and its application in humanist studies is no longer a promise but a reality. while the “first driving force behind handwritten text classification was for digit classification for postal mail,” (balci et humanist studies & the digital age maness and pham 7.1 2022 3 al. 1) it has become more widely used in banking (ghosh et al.) to emerging applications in analyzing historical documents (romero et. al.). and, as machine learning and neural networking advances, htr technology “has the potential to transform access to our written past for the use of researchers, institutions and the general public [and] . . . can extend the existing research infrastructure of the archives, libraries and humanities domain” (muehlberger et al. 955). like ocr’d characters, these encoded handwritten texts will one day pervade digital archives, being readable and analyzable by humans and machines alike. and these encoded texts can and will be analyzed and mined in any number of ways. simply put, in the coming decades htr promises to revolutionize methodologies in humanities disciplines that analyze archival materials, much as ocr has in recent decades. large troves of transcribed materials will be available not only for search-and-retrieval purposes, but for large-scale textual analyses. the jewish consumptives’ relief society our project applies htr to the records of the jcrs collection, an important archive included in the beck archives of rocky mountain jewish history. the records of this institution, particularly the robust patient files, which include application forms and extensive correspondence, document an important era in the development of tuberculosis treatment in america and the history of organizations and the lives of individuals who built jewish life in the rocky mountain region. tuberculosis, or “consumption” as it was also known, was the leading cause of death in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century america. no accepted standard for tuberculosis treatment prevailed in the early years, but by 1880 medical opinion emphasized fresh air for respiratory ailments. because of its high altitude and dry and sunny climate, colorado became so popular a treatment destination for tuberculosis victims it soon earned the nickname of “the world’s sanatorium.” a small group of jewish working-class immigrants in denver founded the jcrs because no publicly supported institution existed at the time. a non-sectarian organization that treated patients in all stages of the disease, over the next fifty years the jcrs provided its services free of charge to over 10,000 patients. two notable east european jewish physicians led the jcrs for extended periods: dr. charles spivak, who served as the executive secretary until his death in 1927, and dr. philip hillkowitz, who served as president until his death in 1948 (abrams). jcrs records are among the most heavily-used collections in du’s archives, and dozens of handwritten letters and records have been digitized and made available through a digital repository for many years. these letters, from the mundane to the poignant, detail stories that describe the immigration, growth and development of colorado's jewish community; of philanthropy and disease; of household and institutional finances; the art, literature and science of the time; and of daily life in this and similar institutions, where americans and new immigrants to the nation lived, loved, suffered, and died in the tens-of-thousands. the collection is used in several courses at du, ranging from sociology to history, wherein students might, for example, extract demographic data to explore diseases of the urban poor, or use genealogical methodologies to track prevailing immigration patterns and compare them to modern day issues of immigration. these learning opportunities contributed in part to several du faculty members winning a national award for the use of primary sources in teaching from the in 2018 (center for research libraries). in addition to teaching, scholars have also used the collection in their published research to demonstrate modern clinical laboratory practices through the gathering of autopsy statistics (wright and abrams), to humanist studies & the digital age maness and pham 7.1 2022 4 foreground historical issues of immigration and the rise of jewish hospitals in the u.s. through correspondence (kraut), to examine yiddish-language letters, poetry, and stories in tuberculosis sanatoriums (gilman), and to examine daily life in tuberculosis sanatoriums and personal experiences with the disease (rothman). in these examples, students and researchers who used these materials only have the option to study a selection of individual records. access to these records is provided in the form of visits to the archive or by browsing digital records available through our digital collections @ du platform, https://specialcollections.du.edu/. researchers often opt to visit the archive for an assignment or for research and record data using their laptop or mobile device from these records, effectively transcribing the same number of documents for their personal use. these users are limited in this respect to studying the few records that they were able to transcribe. automatic transcription will not only ease these uses, but potentially lead to others, particularly in that transcription at scale allows for computational analysis of larger datasets. collections as data project the opportunity to apply to the collections as data: part to whole initiative, supported by the mellon foundation, arose while transcription methods were being explored at du libraries. this multi-institutional initiative, centered at the university of nevada at las vegas, provided funding to two project cohorts over the course of sixteen months that proposed to explore technical, organizational, and ethical issues related to turning archival collections into data. du libraries committed staff and technical resources to investigating and applying htr to noteworthy collections in our archives as a pilot project, with the hopes of long-term adoption of these tools at scale. because researchers and students often repeat the process of transcribing and collecting data from jcrs materials, a significant barrier to deep forms of analysis and potential creative forms of engagement with students and faculty, this archive was chosen for the pilot. the handwritten documents in the jcrs records represent a valuable source not only to teaching and research in domains that use archival materials, but of data that should contribute to the ongoing development of htr algorithms and technologies: training the models necessary to transcribe jcrs materials involved several hands, forms with both type and hand-written text, and quality of scans. the project contributes, then, to both scholarship that may use these data, but also digital library collections services as a discipline in itself. another benefit of the project includes the creation and publication of these data as a way to preserve the information contained in historical texts at a greater scale than is possible through archival description alone. it also facilitates skills necessary in archival organizations to responsibly transform already digitized materials into machine-usable data. essentially, collections as data allowed du libraries not only to produce and preserve a useful dataset, but to build internally the necessary skills and infrastructure for htr work, even as it contributed to the larger infrastructure undergirding it, and to explore the ethical issues associated with both. six discrete phases guided the project: 1) initiation/planning; 2) data preparation; 3) constructing an htr pipeline; 4) producing collections as data; 5) building delivery platform; and 6) service design. the first phase involved training and planning on how to use the htr platform transkribus, technology developed with support from the european union, which was used to transcribe the documents and produce the data (read coop). an ethics advisory board (eab) was also formed in the initiation phase, which would become critically important as services were designed in the final stage. the data preparation phase included generating ground truth and training data for the model that would ultimately auto-transcribe the collection. this work required manual transcription of documents, a necessary humanist studies & the digital age maness and pham 7.1 2022 5 step in that it provides correct data for machine-learning models so they may improve recognition and apply that “learning” to the entire collection (figure 1). quality assurance (qa) scripts were also created to assist in this process. figure 1. editing and transcribing a document to generate ground truth in the transkribus platform. note the line-by-line transcription below the image. the htr pipeline phase entailed iterative training of the model in transkribus, on both ground-truth and training data, to achieve a character error recognition rate (cer, the percentage of characters encoded incorrectly) low enough that the transcripts would be legible by humans. in this phase, every time the htr pipeline is run in transkribus, more data is produced, which is then manually corrected and added to the ground truth and training data; subsequent runs of the htr pipeline then yield improved results. two months into the project the cer was above 50%, and at the end of 18 months the goal of < 10% cer was accomplished (figure 2). research with transkribus demonstrates that a cer of more than 10% renders automated transcriptions less useful research resources, simply because correcting errors would be more time consuming than manual transcription (muehlberger et al. 962). humanist studies & the digital age maness and pham 7.1 2022 6 figure 2. the process of training a machine learning model on the jcrs collection. the character error rate reached 9.4% after 18 months and over 40,000 words in the training data. improvements began to plateau at this point and the model was sufficient to begin automated transcription. barbara statement on collections as data” (padilla). this document suggests ten principles upon which cultural heritage institutions should rest their access policies and services for computationally-analyzable data, noting that “ethical concerns are integral to collections as data,” that “a commitment to openness” should be considered parallel to “care must be taken to comply with legal requirements, cultural norms, and the values of vulnerable groups” (padilla et al. 2). indeed, the second santa barbara principle is: ultimately, the project demonstrated this work is possible, sustainable, and valuable. but serious ethical considerations were also addressed in the final phase of the project. ethical considerations one of the evaluation criteria for the collections as data: part to whole call for proposals was whether the project “demonstrates commitment to developing and implementing processes for addressing complex ethical issues inherent to engagement with cultural heritage data, and the needs of marginalized and underrepresented communities” (part to whole). this criterion is to some degree an outgrowth of previous work of the always already computational – collection as data project, funded by the institute for museum and library services (imls), from which arose the “santa barbara statement on collections as data” (padilla). this document suggests ten principles upon which cultural heritage institutions should rest their access policies and services for computationally-analyzable data, noting that “ethical concerns are integral to collections as data,” that “a commitment to openness” should be considered parallel to “care must be taken to comply with legal requirements, cultural norms, and the values of vulnerable groups” (padilla et al. 2). indeed, the second santa barbara principle is: “collections as data stewards are guided by ongoing ethical commitments. these commitments work against historic and contemporary inequities represented in collection scope, description, access, and use. commitments should be formally documented and made publicly humanist studies & the digital age maness and pham 7.1 2022 7 available. commitment details will vary across communities served by collections but will share common cause in seeking to address the needs of the vulnerable. collection stewards aim to respect the rights and needs of the communities who create content that constitute collections, those who are represented in collections, as well as the communities that use them” (padilla et al. 3). this principle, applied to jcrs materials, particularly patient records published as data, illuminates a variety of serious ethical questions that need answering. legal requirements, cultural norms, and the values of a potentially vulnerable group—in this case the jewish community—were taken into consideration and resulted in a terms-of-use approach that differentiates uses and leverages the eab, comprised of experts in several domains and members of the rocky mountain jewish community. legal requirements two legal requirements are at issue in determining access to jcrs materials. the first is the health insurance portability and accountability act (hipaa) of 1996 (united states congress). this act, and perhaps more to the point, the resulting “privacy rule” that was finalized by the department of health and human services in may of 2003, governs access and protection of certain health information (department of health and human services). this rule defines both “covered entities,” which are both individuals and organizations to whom the act applies, and “protected health information (phi),” data about which the act applies. though the analysis can be somewhat complicated, with respect to jcrs materials held by the university of denver libraries, the libraries are not a “covered entity” (department of health and human services) and jcrs records are not phi, as the individuals to whom these records pertain are all deceased more than fifty years prior to the libraries providing access to them (department of health and human services). hippa, then, does not restrict the libraries from providing access to information in the jcrs collection. a second legal consideration is whether these data are subject to institutional review board (irb) protocols, which oversee the ethical conduct of research involving human subjects per federal regulation. human subjects are defined by the code as “a living individual about whom an investigator (whether professional or student) conducting research obtains: (1) data through intervention or interaction with the individual, or (2) identifiable private information” (code of federal regulations). again, jcrs records are not subject to these regulations as they all involve deceased individuals. there are then no known legal barriers to the libraries providing public access to jcrs records, and for this reason they have been available in part as scanned images for many years in various online repositories and have contributed to research and genealogy works. simply put, we can provide access to these materials. but that does not always mean we should. ethics advisory board to address ethical issues related to “cultural norms” and the “values of vulnerable groups,” per the santa barbara statement, this project seated an eab. comprised primarily of members of the jewish community in denver, including many who work with the rocky mountain jewish historical society, the eab includes a physician, an attorney, an historian, a medical-ethicist, and a librarian with a juris doctorate. once the project was funded, the eab was presented the project design and objectives, primers on the ethical considerations of relevance, and asked to help construct a model by which access to jcrs data would be provided. first and foremost, the eab was advised that fundamentally new questions may arise from fact that htr would enable the collection to be computationally analyzed. one concern grew from what was at the time humanist studies & the digital age maness and pham 7.1 2022 8 a very recent (and which of course remains an unspeakably horrific) attack on a synagogue in the united states. the newly public availability of this dataset, pertaining to a community vilified at points throughout history during the outbreak of disease (schaub), potentially presents opportunities for bad-faith users that, while strictly possible from simply scanned images, is likely too painstaking to be of great concern. perhaps a different access policy should be applied to transcripts as an entire dataset than the images and individual transcripts presented alongside them. the eab was also presented approaches adopted by projects with somewhat overlapping issues, in addition to summaries of the santa barbara statement and the work that led to its formation. its very formation was inspired, in fact, in conversations with a project team at the university of california san francisco, whose work on “no more silence – opening the data of the hiv/aids epidemic,” seeks to provide “200,000 pages of textual aids/hiv historical materials which have been digitized as part of various digitization projects . . . [and] will extract unstructured, textual data from these materials using optical character recognition (ocr) and related software” (ucsf). this project of course shared similarities with respect to medical information in a potentially vulnerable community. there are significant differences between these projects in that no more silence entails some records that include phi and are thereby subject to hippa. their approach utilizes a confidentiality agreement as a prerequisite to view some records, wherein researchers agree not to disclose any phi in their work in a legallybinding document that indemnifies the institution in any future litigation. the eab did not feel such a strict access measure would be necessary for jcrs materials, even if not legally required, but was interested in an agreement of some sort that would commit researchers to ethical use. another project that informed conversations with the eab was “digital histories of eugenic sterilization: developing a multi-modal prototype and best practices for sensitive health data.” this project sought, in part, to propose “guidelines for best practices around the digital uses of protected health information” (stern and wernimont 2) and found there is “disagreement across disciplinary fields about what constitutes appropriate use of sensitive materials” (4). stern and wernimont further framed the disagreement as “a generally unresolvable tension between ‘the right to know’ and the ‘need to protect’” (4), concluded “the notion of universal best practices is problematic when dealing with such information” (11) and that “it is imperative for archive-makers to engage with impacted communities so that digital materials are meaningful for them” (14). eab discussions regarding the jcrs materials echoed many of these themes, including disciplinary disagreements that led to a desire to somehow address the tension between “knowing” and “protecting.” similar to no more silence, the digital histories project included phi and is further subject to “pertinent california code that [states] all documents 75 years and older are completely open access and can be used in their entirety and documents less than 75 years old should be de-identified” (4). the project ultimately produced eugenic rubicon, “a digital resource that draws from and complements the demographic and social science research on eugenic sterilization in california” (wernimont). this interactive digital resource includes records regarding victims of this state-sanctioned, forced sterilization, and manages the “knowing” versus “protecting” tension (and complies with relevant legislation) by redacting individual’s names, openly exploring ethical issues in its text, and including and contributing to calls for redress to survivors of this “deplorable human rights abuse” (l.a. times). quite recently california has followed the lead of other states in providing reparations to survivors (morris). humanist studies & the digital age maness and pham 7.1 2022 9 finally, the eab discussed published principles that guide work of the “colored conventions project,” a comprehensive and broad initiative that curates, shares, exhibits, and incorporates into teaching and research documents from “colored conventions,” gatherings that were “held throughout the antebellum period and continuing for 30 years beyond the civil war,” and which “offered opportunities for free-born and formerly enslaved african americans to organize and strategize for racial justice” (colored convention project). the principles helped the eab focus its efforts to manage the tension between “knowing” and “protecting” with respect to jcrs records as data, particularly the fifth: we affirm the role of black people as data creators and elevate the ways in which black conventions generated data and statistics to advance, affirm and advocate for black economic and organizational success and access. we also recognize that data has long served in the processes and recording of the destruction and devaluation of black lives and communities. we seek to avoid exploiting black subjects as data and to account for the contexts out of which black subjects as data arise. we seek to name black people and communities as an affirmation of the black humanity inherent in black data/curation. we remind ourselves that all data and datasets are shaped by decisions about whose histories are recorded, remembered, and valued (colored convention project). there was a desire among the eab and the project team to, in a similar fashion, elevate the ways in which the jcrs advanced and affirmed the right to health care of the poor, immigrants, and the marginalized, and the philanthropy and beneficence of the primarily jewish founders and caretakers of the sanitarium. there was a desire to continue providing access to documents that lend themselves to genealogical research (a strong cultural value in many communities, including the jewish community), and a desire to humanize the individual patients, nurses, doctors and staff of the jcrs, who sought simply to, as the mission of the sanitarium declared, “alleviate human suffering.” and there was also a desire to protect these individuals and their progeny from destruction and devaluation, the realities of which could be made more possible by materials published as data, even as these data may also contribute to humanization and “knowing.” simply put, the eab decided not only that we can, but that we should. and that we should explicitly ask users to consider these ethical questions as they engage in the data provided them. a hybrid approach was agreed upon, one wherein individual transcripts would be provided fully open access alongside scanned images in order to aid genealogy, search and retrieval of individuals, but access to the full dataset of transcripts, where computational analysis is made eminently more possible, would be accompanied by a terms of use agreement. terms of use approach inspired by and borrowing from colored convention project principles, no more silence, and digital histories, jcrs data users are now required to agree to the following terms before given access to the collection as data: “i affirm the role of jcrs patients and staff as data creators and will avoid exploiting and/or dehumanizing them by treating them simply as data. my research will, when possible and appropriate, account for the contexts surrounding the jcrs subjects as data arise. my work will recognize that all data and datasets are shaped by decisions about how histories are recorded, remembered, and valued. if the nature of my work is such that i am sharing the life stories and/or narratives of individuals in these data, and i can do so with no potential harm to their reputation or that of their ancestors, i will humanist studies & the digital age maness and pham 7.1 2022 10 honor them by naming them. if the nature of my work is such that i am exploring large-scale patterns in the dataset, and naming individuals serves no specific research purpose, i will anonymize and/or redact names within the data. if i am publishing the results of research conducted with these data, i will, if possible and appropriate, include a note of recognition and/or gratitude in my publication. we suggest a version of: ‘this work was made possible in part by the patients, staff, nurses, physicians, and community of the jewish consumptives’ relief society (jcrs). the people who lived, worked, and died at the jcrs sought to relieve human suffering. i am grateful to them.’” this hybrid approach, while by no means completely or perfectly resolving the tension of “knowing” and “protecting,” allows for the continued and enhanced engagement of these materials as single documents, while also introducing a new level of “protecting” that asks researchers to reflect on the data, their context, the humans and their context, and the researcher themselves and their context. discussion while the tension between “knowing” and “protecting” cannot be fully resolved, the jcrs project and its engagement with the eab underscores that archivists engaging with community members is imperative and that “it is incumbent upon those creating newly public and accessible resources on such sensitive histories to address issues of possible individual or community harm” (stern and wernimont 12). working with the eab allowed the project team to address issues of possible harm introduced by the availability of transcripts as a dataset, while also facilitating the use of data in ways that honors cultural norms and the values of the community. certainly, there are distinct differences among the projects discussed with the eab. whereas one involves forced, unnecessary and destructive invasions of the body, the jcrs offered desired medical attention to those desperate for it: one institution harmed and prevented life, the other lengthened and affirmed it. but there are also similarities, not only in terms of types of data, but underlying purposes of their original creation. three of these projects, in fact, document in some manner or another the work of oppressed communities advocating for themselves, whether it be after centuries of enslavement and ongoing oppression, or during epidemics that disproportionally affected vulnerable communities. that the work of the jcrs was benevolent does not prevent its data from being malevolently used, however. how and why the data was originally collected and used can be divorced from how and why it is stored and used by people long after the fact. indeed, the very vocabulary used in digital archival work suggests the records of people may reduce those people to mere things: “the lexicon of digital collections extends the freighted, fretted, relation of categorization and data collection, to black subject and black subjectivity . . . the term ‘item,’ like ‘object,’ again recalls the ways in which black people appear/ed in public records –as items on manifests” (foreman 11). that the jcrs categorized and inventoried humans not as property, but in fact for the purpose of healing them, does not prevent users today from using the very same data in order to treat them as less than human. ultimately, jcrs records are often mere ledgers, of people and transactions, of diagnoses and treatments, of events and relationships among individuals. as data, their use is not determined by who produced the data, but by those who analyze it. humanist studies & the digital age maness and pham 7.1 2022 11 and as responsible stewards of these data, it is incumbent upon project teams to ask the questions, engage community members, and resist the urge to apply generic best practices to each project. conclusion this paper does not suggest an approach that can be simply replicated. on the contrary, the tension between knowing and protecting, between a commitment to openness and to ongoing ethical considerations that may run contrary to full openness, is one that can only be managed via careful planning and communication. as technology continues to evolve and is applied to archival sciences, it is important it be mediated by humans. humans, not only as data producers, users, or analysts, but as individuals who are also members of communities. the person and their social context –whether they are the studied or the studier– should be held in the forefront throughout. what technology makes possible legality will not always constrict: only the intentional application of professional ethics can manage the tension in this work. the santa barbara statements provide an enormously helpful centerpiece to these considerations. this project does, however, offer an approach, informed by those that preceded it, that can be of use to similar projects. seating an advisory board, with various expertise and of members of potentially vulnerable communities, and sharing with them approaches developed by others, can be an effective way of developing culturally-sensitive principles, values, and terms of use that guide digital collections work and their resulting analyses. the lure of powerful new technologies such as htr are strong and scholars cannot divorce themselves from those they study, as harm is not always readily apparent. as the humanities, archives and library studies, and other disciplines embark on quests to “rescue” archival data for modern use, as in general they should, they ought also to be careful to ask on a case-by-case and continual basis not only whether they should, but if so, how. acknowledgement this work was made possible in part by the patients, staff, nurses, physicians, and community of the jewish consumptives’ relief society (jcrs). the people who lived, worked, and died at the jcrs sought to relieve human suffering. we are grateful to them. we are also thankful to our colleague dr. jeanne abrams, professor, center for judaic studies and university libraries; director, rocky mountain jewish historical society; and curator, beck archives of rocky mountain jewish history, university of denver. for decades dr. abrams has been a careful steward and analyst of the jcrs and its records. without her career-long dedication and expertise there would simply be no collection to transcribe, nor, perhaps, any awareness of its value. our work was also made possible by the collections as data: part to whole project and the support of the andrew w. mellon foundation. works cited ucsf archives & special collections. ucsf archives & special collections awarded $99,325 lsta grant for textual data extraction from historical materials on aids/hiv. 16 august 2018. https://blogs.library.ucsf.edu/broughttolight/2018/08/16/ucsf-archives-special-collections-awarded99325-lsta-grant-for-textual-data-extraction-from-historical-materials-on-aids-hiv/. 16 august 2021. humanist studies & the digital age maness and pham 7.1 2022 12 abrams, jeanne. dr. charles david spivak: a jewish immigrant and the 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"automated transcription of non-latin script periodicals: a case study in the ottoman turkish print archive." arxiv preprint (2020). https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.01139. humanist studies & the digital age maness and pham 7.1 2022 13 kraut, alan. "“no matter how poor and small the building”: health care institutions and the jewish immigrant community." yvonne yazbeck haddad, jane i smith, jane i. smith, john l. esposito. religion and immigration: christian, jewish, and muslim experiences in the united states. n.d. los angeles times editorial board. "editorial: california needs to do more than apologize to people it sterilized ." los angeles times 21 january 2017. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-edeugenics-california-20170122-story.html. mayer, allana. "crowdsourcing, open data and precarious labour." 2016. model view culture. https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/crowdsourcing-open-data-and-precarious-labour. 16 august 2021. morris, amanda. "‘you just feel like nothing’: california to pay sterilization victims." the new york times 11 july 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/us/california-reparations-eugenics.html. muehlberger, g., seaward, l., terras, m., ares oliveira, s., bosch, v., bryan, m., colutto, s., déjean, h., diem, m., fiel, s., gatos, b., greinoecker, a., grüning, t., hackl, g., haukkovaara, v., heyer, g., hirvonen, l., hodel, t., jokinen, m., kahle, p. "transforming scholarship in the archives through handwritten text recognition: transkribus as a case study." journal of documentation (2019): 954-976. orlowitz, jake. "the crowdsourcing fallacy." 2017. medium. https://medium.com/a-wikipedia-librarian/thecrowdsourcing-fallacy-efe510c6f509. 16 august 2021. padilla, thomas, allen, laurie, frost, hannah, potvin, sarah, russey roke, elizabeth, & varner, stewart. "santa barbara statement on collections as data --always already computational: collections as data." 2019. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3066209. part to whole, collections as data. call for proposals. 2018. https://collectionsasdata.github.io/part2whole/cfp/. 16 august 2021. pham, kim. university of denver collections as data. 2020. https://wikis.du.edu/display/libpub/collections+as+data. —. university of denver collections as data entire dataset jcrs 2020_8_30. 2020. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4150881. read coop. transkribus: where ai meets historical documents. n.d. https://readcoop.eu/transkribus/. 24 september 2021. romero, v., serrano, n., toselli, a. h., sánchez, j. a., & vidal, e. "handwritten text recognition for historical documents." proceedings of the workshop on language technologies for digital humanities and cultural heritage. 2011. 90-96. rothman, sheila. living in the shadow of death: tuberculosis and the social experience of illness in america. basic books, 1995. schantz, herbert f. the history of ocr, optical character recognition. manchester center, vt: recognition technologies users association, 1982. schaub, max. "disease threat and the activation of antisemitism." 2020. https://osf.io/69avn/. 30 august 2021. stern, alexandra minna and jacqueline wernimont. "digital histories of eugenic sterilization: developinga multi-modal prototype and best practices for sensitive health data." white paper, humanities humanist studies & the digital age maness and pham 7.1 2022 14 collections and reference resources, foundations grant, grant number pw-234665-16. 2018. https://securegrants.neh.gov/publicquery/main.aspx?f=1&gn=pw-234665-16. united states congress. "public law 104-191." health insurance portability and accountability act of 1996. n.d. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/plaw104publ191/pdf/plaw-104publ191.pdf. wernimont, jacqueline and alexandra minna stern. eugenic rubicon. n.d. https://scalar.usc.edu/works/eugenic-rubicon-/index. 20 august 2021. just because we can doesn’t mean we should: on knowing and protecting data produced by the jewish consumptives’ relief society jack maness and kim pham handwritten text recognition technology and archival research the jewish consumptives’ relief society collections as data project ethical considerations legal requirements ethics advisory board terms of use approach discussion conclusion acknowledgement works cited humanist studies & the digital age, 6.1 (2019) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.6.1.1 1 pierre lévy and the future of internet massimo lollini semantic metadata, humanist computing and digital humanities, opens with an important interview with pierre lévy that reconstructs the key moments of his philosophical vision of the internet, and the world wide web, up to his most recent and highly innovative proposal of the information economy metalanguage (ieml). if we were to identify a common element to the different aspects of his thought, we could say that this element consists in the search for the actual living unity of human knowledge despite human scattering in space and time. this element was already present in his idea of collective intelligence theorized in 1994 book, intelligence collective: pour une anthropologie du cyberspace (collective intelligence: mankind's emerging world in cyberspace); and has undergone a precise theoretical elaboration in world philosophie: le marché, le cyberespace, la conscience (2000). the latter book offers a philosophical synthesis that goes far beyond the partial reflections that remain focused on discrete aspects of the so-called technological revolution advanced by the internet and the www that scholars often analyze by paying almost exclusive attention to individual devices, on-line reading habits, special computing solutions or social networking practices. the result of these partial analyses often leads critics to condemn the technological revolution in its entirety. pierre lévy’s work is an antidote to these unilateral, quite often apocalyptic, positions and offers the theoretical tools to elaborate a vision of humanity critically unified in and by the space of knowledge. the interview reconstructs lévy's vision from its origins in a reflection on medieval neoplatonic thought, based on a top-down model, to the bottom-up model of collective intelligence that he considers as the engine of human development toward the unification of the planet. in his view, the unification of humanity also includes that of the planet through the digital representation of the physical world that will have beneficial effects in the search for sustainable development. other topics touched on in the interview concern the relationship between the internet and social media, the problem of “fake news,” and the phenomenon of so-called “post-truth,” both in the 1930s, when the prevailing medium was radio, and in the time of the internet characterized by the rise of social media. the problem of new forms of memory needed by collective intelligence at the time of the internet is also briefly touched on in the interview. much space is devoted to the future of the internet, especially in the second part of the interview where lévy introduces his most recent project, the ieml. regarding the future of the internet lévy shares the recent concerns advanced by tim berners-lee, the creator of the www. lévy points out that at a time when more than 60 percent of the human population is connected to the internet, and http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/24/opinion/world-wide-web.html humanist studies & the digital age lollini 6.1 (2019) 2 all information transmitted is reduced to digital data, it becomes crucial for users to be sovereign over their data, which are currently expropriated by the giants of internet like google and facebook. however, the proposal to create the ieml derives from another need, that of augmenting our collective categorization power and developing new symbolic systems suitable for the digital medium. the ieml is essentially a language, a sophisticated system of semantic metadata that will allow humans to do much more refined conceptual research than is possible today. in short, the ieml aspires to be a new layer of a universal addressing system, at a time when, for the first time in human history, the human species is growing a universally interconnected common memory where ubiquitous data can be accessed and transformed by automatic symbol manipulators. the new universal addressing system is called uniform sematic locator (usl) via semantic tags; it is conceived as a new layer on top of the actual interconnection between documents via the web and the urls. ieml promotes interconnection between ideas and offers a semantic space capable to augment collective intelligence by bringing together the humanistic disciplines and the social sciences. lévy explains in detail the various aspects of his proposal including its new anthropological space, the “space of knowledge,” and in the appendix to the interview he offers some very interesting paradigms of morphemes for the ieml. *** in the “interventions” section our journal features an important reflection by dino buzzetti on the distinction between humanities computing and digital humanities. the essay, originally published in italian, critically supports the rationales behind humanities computing, characterized by a primary interest in methodological issues and their epistemological background. buzzetti reconstructs accurately the history of this idea starting from the seminal works of scholars like jeanclaude gardin, who underlined the need for an awareness that computation applied to the humanities requires both representation (data structures), and information processing (algorithms). buzzetti argues that this awareness has been lost with the advent of digital humanities that have focused on the pure representation of research data, losing sight of their cognitive and algorithmic processing. in this perspective, the digital humanities, with proposals like the textual encoding initiative (tei), has become a document community taking care of the automation of the visualization and printing processes of the documents, setting aside the vision of a community dedicated instead to the design of archives structured data, the database community. while not expounding the sort of philosophical and phenomenological vision that characterizes lévy's approach, buzzetti's intervention goes well with the ideas expressed by lévy in stressing the cognitive value of humanities computing and the new design dimension of culture within the socalled semantic web. common to the two scholars, albeit from different perspectives, is also the search for formal models that allow a methodological convergence between the humanities and the sciences, between the predominantly objective methods of the natural sciences and the prevalently subjective ones of literary or discursive production in general. buzzetti's analysis also includes the markup used for the digital representation of the text that he considers simultaneously “representation” and “representation of the representation.” after all, he argues, the cyclic and self-referential nature of the discursive process itself leads to a theoretical humanist studies & the digital age lollini 6.1 (2019) 3 perspective which, following scholars such as varela and merleau-ponty, excludes the absolute separation between the subject and the object, between the observer and the observed. the recognition of the unavoidable relationship between the observer and the systems observed is not limited to the human sciences but extends to the field of physical and biological sciences. for this reason, buzzetti concludes, the paradigm of self-referentiality seems to open a new perspective of convergence between the methods of natural sciences and the methods of the human sciences characterized by the implementation of a computational model of the discursive processes proper to scientific constructions of the humanities. *** the three projects that are introduced in the third part of the journal respond differently to the theoretical solicitations presented in the first two sections. following the categories of pierre lévy, we should say that, even if in a different way, all three projects are the product of a collective intelligence and at the same time contribute to expand the knowledge of a physical territory (in the case of noisemakers! and of the dialogues bioregional project) or of a literary tradition (in the case of #laura speaks), making the process of their digital processing transparent. on the other hand, if instead we wanted to consider these projects from the point of view of the categories proposed by buzzetti, we should indicate that they belong above all to the realm of the digital humanities and only partially to that of humanist computing. the prevailing interest of these projects is in fact the representation and remediation of data belonging to the physical and/or cultural world. furthermore, all three are highly invested in extending the reach of the digital humanities beyond the borders of academia and into the public realm. noisemakers! putting the analog in digital humanities by serena ferrando and mark wardecker describes an innovative collaborative and interdisciplinary project whose main purpose is to create concrete opportunities for students to participate in the “real” world and engage with the materiality of noise and its manifestations by interacting with the soundscape through interactive and multisensory practices. noisefest! is centered around waterville, a small maine town, and rooted in the sounds and noise of its streets. it comprises a virtual reality tour, soundwalks and remixes, a 2d laser cut geographical map with arduino controllers, and a futuristic noise intoner. at the intersection of theory and experiential learning, this project help students developing the ability to portray and “play” the city of as a musical instrument to draw attention to the city as a multilayered sound system. the dialogues bioregional project: landscape ecology in central italy from the sixth century to the present by damiano benvegnù, outlines the “dialogues bioregional project,” a digital, interdisciplinary interface on italian landscape ecology which promotes dialogues between scientists and humanists as well as provide a modeling tool for environmental and cultural awareness. shaped around the “dialogues” of pope gregory i, this digital humanities project explores continuities and discontinuities between the socio-political and ecological history of a specific section of italian territory, a set of multidisciplinary environmental narratives (from c. 600 ad to the present), and local communities. ultimately, this project will encourage communities to re-approach their natural settings in ecological terms. humanist studies & the digital age lollini 6.1 (2019) 4 #lauraspeaks: remediations of pellegra bongiovanni’s “risposte” by elisa briante, marena lear, and gerardo pisacane, is a project meant to enrich the database of the oregon petrarch open book with a translation and remediation of pellegra bongiovanni’s risposte di madonna laura alle rime di messer francesco petrarca, in nome della medesima (1763). each of the three authors contributes an original essay. elisa briante’s “voicing laura: pellegra bongiovanni’s challenge” illustrates bongiovanni’s importance within the realm of petrarchism, marena lear’s “a living text: pellegra bongiovanni’s risposte and theories of remediation” discusses the translation of bongiovanni’s work from italian to english and the creation of the “twitterature” version of the text. finally, gerardo pisacane’s “francesco, you've got mail the movie. literary criticism through cinema” analyses the remediation of bongiovanni’s risposte into the film medium. the authors also investigate the theoretical premises of digital remediation and the role that hypertext plays in multiplying opportunities for meaningmaking and in enriching the act of reading and writing. *** in closing these brief introductory notes to the volume on semantic metadata, humanist computing and digital humanities, i would like to invite the authors of this issue and the other authors who over the years have contributed to humanist studies and the digital age to propose the topic of the next issue of the journal, to be published in 2021. the invitation is extended to all readers of the journal who are passionate about our analysis of the fate of writing and reading in the internet age. already in this issue the interview with pierre lèvy adds a philosophical and phenomenological dimension to this exciting theme pierre lévy and the future of internet massimo lollini humanist studies & the digital age, 7.1 (2022) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda/7.1.7 1 two projects from the metalab (at) harvard jeffrey schnapp a flitting atlas of the human gaze kevin brewster, todd linkner, dietmar offenhuber, and jeffrey schnapp metalab (at) harvard, (summer-fall 2020/winter 2021) a flitting atlas of the human gaze is one component of metalab’s ongoing curatorial a(i)gents project which consists in a series of machine-learning experiments that involve human curators working collaboratively with computational systems on the analysis and interpretation of the collections of the harvard art museum. first presented at the ars electronica festival on september 11, 2020, originally slated for installation at the harvard art museum around that same time (but postponed due to the museum’s closure during the pandemic), the experiments range from critical inquiries into the environmental costs of running deep learning models to a curator bot that selects artworks on the basis of real time color matching with the color of the overhead sky to an ai-based variation on the classic surrealist game of the cadavre exquis to a deliberately “broken” art recommendation engine. within this setting, a flitting atlas of the human gaze performs an art historical experiment. the experiment is built upon the ai-based extraction and analysis, fine-tuned via human supervision, of pairs of eyes from the museum’s photograph, painting, print, sculpture, and coin collections that have then been analyzed and mapped from the standpoint of the directionality of the depicted subject’s gaze. the aggregate data has been transformed into an interactive experience—online in its current iteration; on-site in the harvard art museum’s lightbox gallery upon the gallery’s reopening—which allows the visitor to navigate either the collection as a whole or media-based subcollections by moving the focal point via a cursor. for centuries visitors have navigated collections on the basis of culture, chronology, genre, and medium; to those conventional forms of exploration, a flitting atlas of the human gaze adds a new mode based on the distribution of looks across media and time. [js] their names matthew battles and kim albrecht metalab (at) harvard, (summer 2020) their names is a kind of dynamic memory wall (which is to say, an online denkmal or monument) that visualizes the names of 28,000+ fatal encounters with american police dating from the year 2000 up until the death of george floyd on may 25, 2020. the names (beneath which are layered descriptions of the fatal events with which they are associated) may be viewed from the standpoint of year, gender, age, ethnicity, location, or cause; they may also be toggled on or off. the project was developed by kim albrecht working with matthew battles on the basis of the fatal encounters database methodically compiled by d. brian burghart and his team at university of southern california to track police-involved fatalities in the absence of any comparable federal http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ https://metalabharvard.github.io/ars-flittingatlasofthegaze/ https://theirnames.org/ https://fatalencounters.org/ humanist studies & the digital age schnapp 7.1 2022 2 resource. the data set in question makes no assumptions regarding the nature of each fatal encounter or the precise role performed by police. it comprises everything from homicides to accidents and suicides, and relies upon police and media reporting whose reliability or bias is inherently hard to ascertain. nearly 6,000 of the victims are reported as african-american; another 9,000 are listed as “race unspecified.” there are gaps in the record, names reduced to little more than initials. rather than map this community on the basis of the taxonomical practices of police or media, their names paints what is perhaps best described as a “pixelated” collective portrait of these mortalities in which each pixel is an individual, a life story, a tragedy, that the visitor can either engage in the aggregate, as one of 28,000+ such stories, or navigate in greater depth via the links the underlie each name. [js] two projects from the metalab (at) harvard jeffrey schnapp a flitting atlas of the human gaze their names francis, thou art translated: petrarch metamorphosed in english, 1380-1595 humanist studies & the digital age, 1.1 (2011) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.1.1.1196 80 francis, thou art translated: petrarch metamorphosed in english, 1380-1595 ronald l. martinez, brown university abstract: english translation of petrarch—translation that is also metamorphosis in a manner that petrarch would have recognized—begins with chaucer's rendition of rvf 132 as the canticus troili in the first book of troilus and criseyde, an inaugural moment of lyric imitation long thought unique in chaucer's work. yet suggestive claims have been made that rvf 189 was also rendered by chaucer as troilus' second canticus in book v, within a context inclusive of additional petrarchan influences on chaucer. chaucer's versions, and their contextualization in the troilus, had definite consequences for petrarchan translation when it resumed with the henrician poets thomas wyatt and henry howard a century and a half later. for the tudor poets living under the tyranny of henry viii the petrarch-inspired sonnet offered a richly articulated space of private reflection that did not fail to register the pressure of court politics. wyatt's petrarchan translations in the egerton manuscript represent a privileged part of his lyric production, a preference that the earl of surrey absorbed for his very different poetic program, one designed to exalt both aristocratic lineage and an aureate genealogy of poets including virgil, dante, and chaucer along with petrarch and wyatt. mediated by multiple editions of tottel's songs and sonnettes between 1557 and 1594, the legacy of wyatt's and surrey's petrarchan translations reached the elizabethans with an emphasis on petrarch's poetic supremacy that stimulated emulation by the young shakespeare. his tragedy romeo and juliet threw down a challenge to petrarch with respect to sonnet forms, sonnet rhetoric, and the typical story of enamorment, a story still discernibly affiliated with chaucer's troilus. “and i exhort the unlearned, by reding to learne to bee more skillful, and to purge that swinelike grossenesse, that maketh the swete majerome not to smell to their delight.” (richard tottel, “to the reder,” 1557) “‘assist me, some extemporal god of rime, for i am sure i shall turn sonnet. devise, wit; write, pen; for i am for whole volumes in folio.’” (william shakespeare, love’s labors lost, i.ii.105-106) my title alludes, with an apotropaic nod to bottom’s appearance in shakespeare’s midsummer night’s dream, to translation as metamorphosis. or perhaps rather to metamorphosis as a way of speaking about translation, specifically tudor translation of http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 81 petrarch into english as a principal agent for “purging that swinelike grossenesse” tottel deplores (a counsel that could fairly be directed at bottom himself). the book that the tudor poets reckoned with, petrarch’s rerum vulgarium fragmenta (hereafter rvf), though titled after its formal dispersiveness, is indebted for thematic coherence to the idea of metamorphosis: laura’s image is constantly metamorphosed in the speaker’s memory and his passion subjects him to metamorphosis; most important, the poetry itself results from metamorphosis. as robert durling remarked, there are some transformations in “nel dolce tempo de la prima etade” (rvf 23) that are figures of sublimation, while some suggest that poetry is an expression for emotions otherwise blocked by sexual fear (petrarca lyric, 2229). petrarch offers an etiology of poetry as the therapeutic discharge in language of repressed desire (23.4: “perché cantando il duol si disacerba”): as a translation of desire, in other words. indeed, explicitly so in a scene representing internal experience transmuted into language, the speaker of the canzone, his voice silenced by laura’s interdict, cries out his self-alienation through ink and paper: “gridai con carta e con incostro: / non son mio, no…” (23.99-100; see barkan 211). the cry was destined to resonate as “i am not myne, i am not myne” in an anonymous translation of the canzone, published in richard tottel’s influential anthology of 1557 (no. 154.154; see also no. 206), and would be reiterated in various guises by english petrarchan personae such as sidney’s astrophil (astrophel no. 45.14: “i am not i: pity the tale of me”) and shakespeare’s romeo (romeo and juliet [rom.]: i.i 196-97 “tut, i have lost myself; i am not here / this is not romeo, he’s some other where”).1 in a more prosaic sense petrarch’s vernacular poetry, which harvests rich traditions of latin and romance lyric, is always already translation, if not always as transparently as in the case of rvf 145, “ponmi ove’l sole occide i fiori e l’erba” a consistent imitation of horace’s carmen i.22.17-24, with a conclusion that alludes to propertius. in a letter to boccaccio, relying on senecan precedents, petrarch himself described his preferred practice of creative imitation through the analogy of the son’s resemblance to his father, to suggest how a new work might resemble but differ from its original (fam. 23.19.11-12; see pigman; greene, “petrarch”; rossiter 21-22). like boccaccio and dante, petrarch, despite his excursion into direct translation in the case of boccaccio’s tale of griselda, eschewed and probably disdained the serviceable form of translation known as volgarizzamento, aiming instead at a transformative art of imitation.2 his most talented imitators followed his example: it has been observed of wyatt’s translations of the psalms that “the translator at once pays homage to the original text and transforms it into the representation of his own voice and culture” (greenblatt 120). the instances discussed in this essay are a minute sampling of the reception of petrarch’s poetry in renaissance english letters and exemplify only a few of the ways petrarch’s texts are translated so as to generate new works. chaucer incorporated petrarchan lyric into the narrative development of troilus and criseyde. thomas wyatt and henry howard, earl of surrey, adopt the voice of the petrarchan subject and a form—the “pretty roome” of the sonnet, in john donne’s phrase, or “small parcells” in tottel’s—where a politically resistant kind of writing and self-fashioning finds shelter (greenblatt 155-56, humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 82 foley 37). for these two poets the petrarchan sonnet “creates a tiny private space in which, while bewailing its own powerlessness, the speaking voice can assert its superiority of judgment and feeling, its integrity, or at least its ironic self-knowledge in a faithless and unsympathetic world” (heale 105). for shakespeare, petrarch the laureate poet furnishes both mythologized characters and rhetorical devices for the most excellent and lamentable tragedie of romeo, and iuliet. as it happens, these three moments of petrarchan influence display a suggestive coherence and continuity. in this metamorphic context even what appears to be close translation, such as “set me wheras the sonne dothe perch the grene” (howard no. 3), a version, atypically faithful for surrey, of rvf 145—petrarch’s version, as we saw, of lines from a horatian ode—is rather a carefully calibrated imitative gesture in which the poem’s theme of fidelity resonates metapoetically with the fact of translation itself. in transforming his classical models, petrarch’s poem enumerates twenty-six conditions. these are deployed in lines 1-4 as oppositions expressed by pairs of verses, in lines 5-8 as pairs of opposed conditions divided by caesurae, and in lines 9-11 in groups of three and even four per verse: only in the last line does the poem regain a verse-filling phrase. petrarch’s poem, in effect a highly organized list, was doubtless congenial to the additive, paratactic style surrey adopted in his sonnets (thomson 201-203, zitner 523, ferry 79, heale 90-91), for surrey follows petrarch’s articulation closely and adopts petrarch’s anaphora on “ponmi” for the quatrains and tercets with his own “set me” for all but the last three lines, where a departure is required by the final couplet. george puttenham, in his arte of english poesy (published 1589) cited surrey’s version for its use of anaphora and quoted it as an example of the “distributor” [merismus], a strategy of amplification for orators. the rhetorical elaboration is necessary, however, for surrey’s poem begins as a lover’s boast but ends as a promise of faith, “a mnemonic epigram equal to a vow.” as william sessions observes, “surrey enacts an objective and historically liturgical performance. a great deal of the text appears, in fact, to be a reinscription of the exchange of wedding vows, pronounced in 1532, the year of surrey’s wedding, in english in the middle of a latin ceremony” (201). in this context, even propertius’s latin (elegiae 2.15.36: “huius ero vivus, mortuus huius ero”), reminiscent of the roman legal formula of exchange that stands behind petrarch’s penultimate line (“sarò qual fui, vivrò com’io son visso”), proves functional in underwriting the transformation of the italian poem into an english liturgical act, “the original epigrammatic drive of the sonnet becoming ceremonious language” (sessions 200). surrey’s claim of fidelity, at once personal affirmation and historical document, is also metapoetically “faithful”: cognizant of the latin sources transferred into petrarch’s vernacular, surrey makes his translation of petrarch’s italian the pledge of a literary constancy and continuity worthy of the “courtly maker,” the humanist and laureate poet that surrey aspired to be. petrarch in troilus and criseyde early studies by e.h. wilkins and patricia thomson emphasized the supposed mistakes and padding of chaucer’s translation of the fourteen lines of rvf 132, “s’amor non è,” into twenty-one lines of rhyme royal in the troilus (i.400-421). thomson acknowledges that the humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 83 canticus “anticipates future developments in the hero’s personality” and that the sonnet “does make its own contribution to troilus and criseyde” but her treatment tends to minimize petrarch’s impact on the narrative text, and thus on chaucer in general (thomson 164-65). i will rather proceed with the assumption, which i borrow from several recent critics, that to consider the lyric in its context explains chaucer’s choices as translator better than taking the stanzas in isolation. in short, we are dealing not with volgarizzamento, but imitation, and with a long and ambitious poem demonstrably articulated as a dialectic of lyric and narrative modes (boitani, tragic 56-74; rossiter 109-31). thus for each stanza of his translation, chaucer adopts different expedients. in the first line, chaucer notoriously takes the first line to mean “if no such thing as love exists” rather than—as petrarch’s line is usually understood—that love is the cause of what he feels (“s’ amor non è, che dunque è quel ch’io sento?”). but chaucer’s version is in fact consistent with traditional poetic renderings in italian of the scholastic quaestio regarding the existence and nature of love, and it is thus both conceivable and defensible that his translation is a willful departure from the received interpretation.3 the first four lines of the stanza mirror the first four of petrarch’s quatrain, but after the fourth chaucer inserts an additional three lines, not found in petrarch, which frame troilus’s desire in terms at once sensual (love’s adversities are “savory”) and suggestive of an unslakable spiritual thirst (v.406: “for ay thurst i, the more that ich it drynke”), or perhaps a parody of such a thirst, thus glossing troilus’s besotted idolatry of criseide.4 the second stanza is the least altered: chaucer retains petrarch’s quatrain topics in order, filling out the rhyme royal stanza with one added line in the middle (410: “i noot, ne whi unwery that i feynte”). in the third stanza chaucer follows petrarch’s continuation of the argument regarding the lover’s consent from the second quatrain into the sestet (lines 8-9: “…s’io nol consento? / e s’io ‘l consento…”). but by end-stopping the topic that runs over into the midst of the stanza’s second line and by inserting the logical connective “thus,” with no counterpart in petrarch (414-15: “…i wrongfully / compleyne, iwis. thus passed to and fro”), chaucer spotlights the turn to the nautical metaphor and to troilus’s state of being “amydde the see, bitwixen wyndes two” (417). troilus’s fluctuation summarizes the to and fro of the debate undertaken in the previous stanzas: an effect more marked in chaucer’s version than in petrarch’s, further enhanced by the insertion of a medical metaphor opening the final couplet (419: “allas, what is this wondre maladye?”). the language of disease gives a new and serious context to the petrarchan antitheses of heat and cold, which for chaucer have the power to bring about troilus’s death (line 420), and the medical metaphor also ties the three stanzas together by resuming the interrogative mood of the first stanza. justified, too, in retrospect, are the thirsting and drinking images of the first stanza, now appearing medicalized as symptoms of lovesickness, aegritudo amoris (thomson 161; boitani, tragic 72; rossiter 125-26). as we will see in a moment, chaucer’s focus on the nautical and medical metaphors also prepares later developments. chaucer’s translation of petrarch’s sonnet, sometimes known as the canticus troili, although it has always been admired, has also long been thought an isolated incident (thompson 165; boitani 5): at once the sole textual trace of petrarch’s vernacular lyric humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 84 production in chaucer’s work and the only translation of petrarch until the tudor versions of wyatt, surrey, and anonymous others. but tom stillinger has ably defended the claim that the other song of troilus (also designated in some manuscripts as a canticus troili), in the fifth book (v.596-601), should be thought of as inspired by another sonnet by petrarch, rvf 189 (“passa la nave mia colma d’oblio”), though it is far from a direct translation. stillinger’s analysis proposes that the non-linear, not to say scrambled, representation of petrarch’s original be taken as symptoms of troilus’s psychic disintegration and of a strategic crisis of representation in the troilus in general (stillinger 165-72, 183-89, 194-95, 204-205). what is of interest to my subject here, however, is the fertile premise of stillinger’s argument: that chaucer knew not an isolated sonnet of petrarch, but a version of the canzoniere—perhaps a manuscript of the chigi version, since chaucer’s text of rvf 132 reports the correct reading of the poem according to the chigi version (wilkins 169). as stillinger argues, chaucer, while in italy in 1368, 1372-73 or 1378, was more likely to have encountered a manuscript of the chigi or later version than to have happened upon isolated poems or fascicles (172-78). what is more, since the chigi concludes the first part of petrarch’s collection with rvf 189 (petrarca, canz. 820), that poem may have been conspicuous to chaucer’s view. it is also clear that rvf 132 and 189 are themselves closely related verbally: although the nautical metaphor is frequent in petrarch’s collection (e.g. rvf 80, 132.10-12, 235.5-14, 366.67-71), in the case of these two poems the parallels are multiple and coordinated, as diani has exhaustively tabulated (157). the second text often referred to as canticus troili is as follows: o sterre, of which i lost have al the light, with herte soor wel oughte i to biwaille, that evere derk in torment, nyght by nyght, toward my deth, with wynd in steere i saille; for which the tenthe nyght, if that i faille the gydyng of thi bemes bright an houre, my ship and me caribdis will devoure. (tc v.596-601) the contrasts between the polished account of rvf 132, which celebrates troilus’s longdelayed surrender to love by embellishing its source (perhaps to suggest how troilus’s heart expands in love), and the disordered, diminished version of rvf 189, marking the beginning of the end for troilus’s affair with criseyde, are strongly motivated thematically: if the first sonnet requires amplificatio to fill three stanzas, the second canticus is literally a half-sonnet, articulated within a single stanza of rhyme royal as a single quatrain and single tercet. chaucer’s sequence of topics inverts petrarch’s, who mentions the obscuration of the lady’s eyes at the end of the sonnet, while for chaucer this event is placed first; but petrarch names scylla and charybdis early, while in chaucer charybdis is mentioned in the last line, as the fatal destination. petrarch’s sonnet is thus upended: the tormented logic of the fragment results in part from this inversion. the topsy-turvy sonnet mirrors troilus’s disintegrating confidence in the prospects for his love: thus the “word is cosyn to the dede” (canterbury tales i.742). humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 85 the beginning and end of the fragment also register strong chaucerian modifications with respect to rvf 189. although the “dolci usati segni,” of rvf 189 stand for laura’s eyes, chaucer’s placement of “o sterres” to begin the canticus distances him from petrarch, who never begins a poem in rvf addressing his lady’s eyes, and the fragment ends with “devour,” never found in petrarch’s lyrics. for a parallel we must go to dante’s inferno, where this term describes how the bottom of hell swallows its damned (“al fondo che divora / lucifero con giuda” inf. 31.142). this last chaucerian modification exceeds petrarch’s tempered lyric diction to reflect the gravity of troilus’s condition within the narrative: indeed, troilus “at sea” evokes dante’s ulysses, swallowed up by the ocean and found in hell. again, troilus’s narrative situation conditions the lyric text, or, if we accept picone’s reading of petrarch’s sonnet, supplements it by realizing the narrative implications of rvf 189, which for picone alludes to the disaster of dante’s ulysses (picone 170-76). thus as stillinger observes, even if we were to reject chaucer’s direct knowledge of rvf 189, we would still have a second troilian canticus that is unmistakably a development of the first canticus, where the third stanza contains the same petrarchan topos, as we saw, suitably emphasized in order to enter into dialogue with the canticus in the final book. the narrative consequence of the close relation of the two cantici is to juxtapose in the reader’s mind the scene of troilus’s enamorment, which occurs before the first canticus, and the moment that heralds his ruin. this plurality of lyrics is itself significant in chaucer’s poem, which, as readers have pointed out, is a translation of boccaccio’s filostrato, where lyric insets are seamlessly fitted into the narrative texture (stillinger 179-89; see also natali). the presence of the narrator’s boethian hymn (tc iii.1-49), and troilus’s own lyric apostrophe to love, near the center of the work (iii.1254-74), and pandarus’s canzone-like apostrophe of love in iii.1743-1771, again in boethian terms, suggests that troilus, too, is a lyric “anthology” including poems ranging from love lyrics and canzoni to a philosophical hymn; nor is this an exhaustive list. indeed chaucer, after inserting troilus’s first song where there is none in boccaccio, replaces a discrete lyric when he finds one in the filostrato (v.62). the text he replaces is boccaccio’s version of a five-stanza canzone by cino da pistoia, “la dolce vista e’l bel guardo soave,” which boccaccio digests into four stanzas of ottava rima (he omits the third), after which he adds a further stanza of his own devising, consistent in theme with cino’s canzone (boccaccio 217, 330). the canzone is further a model for chaucer in that boccaccio must adapt the canzone stanza to the narrative octave, an exercise that requires the solution of problems similar to those chaucer faces accommodating petrarch’s sonnet to the rhyme royal stanza of troilus.5 we cannot be sure that chaucer knew the authorship of cino’s canzone inserted by boccaccio,6 but we can conclude that he recognized it as a distinct lyric, since he replaced it with a distinct canticus of his own. if, moreover, we take the two cantici troili as a system, the fact that chaucer inserted as the first canticus a poem by an author different from that of his proclaimed source (the enigmatic lollius) may suggest he was aware that the cino insertion was by an author different from the author of filostrato. chaucer may thus have been cognizant of participating in a multiauthorial system of transferring, deleting, and inserting poems, an activity not unlike petrarch’s in compiling humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 86 the rvf. indeed, chaucer calls special attention to the insertion of the first canticus by insisting that he goes beyond his immediate source in giving “naught only the sentence / as writ myn auctor called lollius,” but the whole text, and further warrants that the reader (or copyist) will find that full text immediately following: “and whoso list it here, / loo, next this vers he may it fynden here” (i.398-99). he thus announces the prestige of the original, as well as foregrounding his active collection and compilation of texts. for my purposes it is significant that lyric patches are especially abundant in the same regions of the poem as the petrarchan borrowings, though only in chaucer, as we saw, are both of troilus’s lyric moments marked with the insert of a canticus. troilus’s first canticus, for example, comes immediately before his formal submission to the god of love, three stanzas that seem like another song, and that in some manuscripts were in fact conflated with the petrarchan material; moreover, the first stanza of chaucer’s version subsequently circulated separately (chaucer 1028, stillinger 251). the context of the second canticus troili is even richer in lyric insets: troilus v.561-81 recalls, distributed in seven clauses beginning with yonder, the places of troilus’s meetings with criseyde, including his first sight of her: “and in that temple, with hire eyen cleere, me kaughte first my righte lady dere” (566-67); and his winning of her: “in that yonder place / my lady me first took unto hire grace” (580-81). the equivalent passage in boccaccio’s poem is coordinated with five anaphoric iterations of quivi and four of colà (fil. v.54-55), a passage that scholars have long noted is closely related to petrarch’s rvf 112, a sonnet to sennuccio del bene that recalls laura “qui tutta umile, et qui la vidi altera” and so on, with ten iterations (petrarca, canz. 520-21). if chaucer had a complete petrarch he might have noted the resemblances with boccaccio’s narrative. it may thus be significant that although both petrarch and chaucer recall laura and criseyde singing (rvf 112.9: “qui cantò dolcemente”; troilus v.577-78: “so woomanly, with voice melodyous / syngen so weel”), boccaccio’s troilo does not so recall his lady. beyond these multiple lyric moments leading up to the second canticus, which consist of a typically petrarchan act of recollecting the lady (562: “and every thyng com hym to remembrance”) we can consider the immediate framing of the song. troilus is “between hope and drede” (630) just before beginning his song as boccaccio’s troilo is not, but as petrarch’s speaker definitely is in rvf 134.2: “et temo e spero, e ardo, e son un giaccio / in questo stato son, donna, per voi.” 7 troilus wishes “his woful herte for to lighte” (634), where boccaccio has “alcuna sosta quasi al dolor dando” (fil. v.61.4)—not as close as rvf 293.10: “pur di disfogare il doloroso core,” from the sonnet that begins the in morte portion of the chigi version, and that echoes, from the canzone of metamorphoses, petrarch’s familiar assertion of what motivates his song, “perché cantando il duol si disacerba” (rvf 23.4). after his song, troilus remarks of the air that drifts from the greek camp that “or is eyr, that is so soote / that in my soule i fele it doth me boote” possibly recalling rvf 109.1213: “quasi un spirto gentil di paradiso / sempre in quell’aere par che mi conforte.” boccaccio mentions the breath of wind, but not the air: “ciò che soffiarsi sentia del viso, / sì come mandati sospiri da criseida” (fil. v.70.4-6). considering that petrarch’s sestet to the same sonnet begins with “l’aura soave che dal chiaro viso / move col suon de le parole humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 87 accorte…” it might be asked if chaucer’s eyr echoes l’aura, one of the homonyms for laura in the rvf and thus an intimately petrarchan signature. in this context and spirit one also wonders if the line in boccaccio’s author’s preface, “e voi, amanti, priego ch’ascoltiate…” (fil. i.6.1), imitates the first lines of rvf 1 or instead suggested petrarch’s opening to him (and a common source, such as lam. 1.12, cannot be excluded; see martinez 1-10). and of course troilus is surprised by love in a “temple,” the narrative situation that petrarch stages in poems 2-3 of rvf: a scene already topical with dante in the vita nuova and that after boccaccio and petrarch becomes a commonplace, not to say a banality in narratives of courtly love (chaucer 1027, thomson 164-65). the many parallels between filostrato and rvf, and the direction of the influence, are aspects of a longstanding debate that cannot be settled here, although the current trend seems to be in favor of boccaccio’s precedence more often than not.8 david wallace suggests that the winds tugging at troilus at the heart of his first canticus represent chaucer’s two italian masters boccaccio and petrarch, which makes of chaucer’s sonnet the earliest contested ground of the debate itself (63). whichever way the influence went, far more than the textual traces of rvf 132 and 189 in troilus exist to suggest that chaucer framed his story in a broadly petrarchan context and that he enjoyed more than anecdotal access to some form of rvf. looking to the future, chaucer’s example generated a substantial literary corpus based on the amorous troilus and sparked a pair of tudor versions of rvf 132 and, in light of stillinger’s claims, may also have inspired versions of rvf 189, notably wyatt’s “my galy charged with forgetfulnes” but also several attempts by thomas lodge and an important adaptation by shakespeare in romeo and juliet. trial by sonnet: wyatt and surrey recent studies of the poets of the henrician era have emphasized that under the violently imposed reforms of henry viii, in a period of shifting loyalties, reversals of fortune, and catastrophic consequences to imprudent speech, thomas wyatt and henry howard, earl of surrey, developed forms of writing that were not merely constative of royal glory or offered as counsel to the king, in the tradition of the mirror of princes, but instead explored an “inward language” in anne ferry’s phrase: what greg walker has called “writing under tyranny” (walker 299-334, sessions 143-318, 352-420). in wyatt’s case, his writing was abstracted from, though always in relation to, the royal focus of power. for surrey, writing fostered an aristocratic cultural prestige independent of, even antagonistic to, the king’s: a strategy that was to prove fatal. for these two poets, the petrarchan persona of the rvf—hopeful but abashed, narcissistic, reticent and secretive in the public eye, but anxious, passionate, even tumultuous in his internal life, and consequently both internally conflicted and sharply aware of his difference from the world around him—was highly suitable. the petrarchan persona served whether the conflicts the poets expressed were internal struggles with shifting desires or vulnerabilities to external events and restraints on behavior; it served whether the dangers of the outside world were erotic, or political—in the case of wyatt’s relationship to anne boleyn, mistress and the queen of henry viii, the likely subject of a number of poems, necessarily both.9 humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 88 the high-water mark of direct tudor petrarchan translation, and a chief literary monument of the henrician period (though first published in 1557, during the last months of the reign of catholic mary tudor), where the bulk of wyatt and surrey’s translations and imitations of petrarch are included (parker 1939), is tottels’s songs and sonnettes. modern students of the work discern a petrarchizing tendency in the editor’s titling of a wide variety of poems as reflecting the predicaments of an afflicted lover, even when the content of the poems is evidently political, and this occultation explains in part why considerable recent study of both wyatt and surrey has been devoted to filling in the implicit political tensions behind the poetry.10 through tottel’s popularizing anthology the idea of petrarch as the supreme lyric poet reached elizabethans like sidney and shakespeare. in wyatt’s particular case, a collection of his poetry, the egerton manuscript, unbound in wyatt’s lifetime but consisting of leaves that likely retained their order, reveals his own hand at work in the copying and revision of many of his poems.11 the majority of the poems are fairly copied into the manuscript by an amanuensis; many of the poems (some 59) were approved by wyatt himself (harrier i-xiii; powell 261-64). the placement among the first 32 poems of 16 sonnets or other poems translated or imitated from petrarch gives a clear indication of the high importance wyatt attributed to the difficult exercise of petrarchan imitation. a return to petrarchan exemplars at the end of the portion of the manuscript given to wyatt’s shorter poems (folios 67r-70r, including wyatt’s version of rvf 360 in poulter’s meter, with corrections in his handwriting, and the opening two lines of rvf 129, in his handwriting), though perhaps merely fortuitous, may imply wyatt’s decision to frame the collection of shorter lyrics with petrarch-inspired compositions (collected poems [hereafter m&t] 79-82, 84). most interesting for my purposes, the egerton manuscript begins with a rondel (rondeau) based on petrarch’s madrigal rvf 121 (“or vedi, amor”) and offers in third position a sonnet closely imitated from petrarch, rvf 102, “cesare, poi che’l traditor d’egitto” (m&t, no. 3). with regard to the political inflection of courtly life under henry viii, wyatt’s translation, “caesar when the traytour of egypt,” closely follows petrarch’s humanist parable, one that well-informed readers might have seen flavored with machiavellism: with an explicit invocation of bookish lore (“si come è scritto,” wyatt’s “as it is writt”), the historical examples of caesar and hannibal occupy the quatrains, as if miniature plutarchan parallel lives. the pair is in multiple chiastic relation, for caesar is a winner, hannibal a loser; caesar hides his delight at pompey’s death, hannibal his disappointment in the face of defeat. the first tercet of the sestet generalizes the principle of simulazione and the second tercet specifies it of the speaker, whose singing and laughing (“rido o canto”) conceal the anguished tears (“angoscioso pianto”) he weeps because of his hopeless love for laura. the almost riddling syntax of lines 9-13, which wyatt emphasizes in his translation by reversing the order of the terms, itself exemplifies an ambiguous language of dissimulation (ferry 102103, 107). tottel’s rubric for wyatt’s translation of rvf 102, “of others fained sorrow, and the lovers fained mirth” (tottel, no. 50) reads petrarch rather than wyatt, for wyatt’s poem neither requires nor excludes an erotic context. however, in bringing together humanist learning humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 89 (petrarch relies on lucan’s unflattering portrayal of caesar in the de bello civili) with the compressed elaboration of a sonnet to graph the sharp differentiation of the speaker from external circumstances, wyatt’s version of petrarch’s poem can stand at the center of his concerns as a poet, lover, and ambassador inured to the necessity of feigning in the languages of love and diplomacy.12 as greenblatt observes (144-45), the “doubleness” of translation, which strives for equivalent terms in two languages, is homologous with the negotiation typical of diplomacy and a reflection upon the inevitable distortions of the truth and of the self-consequent on practicing it. with the exception of the couplet, where wyatt’s formal principles dictated divergence from petrarch, wyatt maintains petrarch’s rhyme scheme. in the first quatrain, his rhymes egypt and writt calque those of petrarch (egitto, scritto). one departure takes its cue from velutello’s gloss of “or chiara or bruna” as “hor allegra ora mesta” rendered by wyatt as “now sad, now merry” (m&t 264, thomson 191-200). in the couplet, wyatt uses assonance to capture, with the otherwise redundant “any time, or season” (“alcuna volta” in petrarch) the unusual internal rhyme on —una in lines 12-13 of petrarch’s sonnet: però, s’ alcuna volta io rido o canto, whereby, if i laught, any time, or season facciol, perch’ i’ non ò se non quest’ una it is for bicause i have nother way via da celare il mio angoscioso pianto. to cloke my care but vnder spoort and play. wyatt’s poem concludes with pretended jollity rather than petrarch’s inner torment, sealing the poem with the necessity of dissimulation. but the most striking moment of wyatt’s version, combining fidelity to the source with poetic innovation, is the account of hannibal’s intense disappointment, which renders petrarch’s “rise fra gente lagrimosa et mesta / per isfogare il suo acerbo dispitto” (lines 7-8) as “laught to his folke whome sorrowe did torment, / his cruel dispite for to disgorge and qwit.” included in egerton in a version almost certainly revised for that manuscript by wyatt (m&t xxiii), the rare and forceful disgorge,13 nearly a homophone for isfogare, seems emblematic of a courtier’s revulsion before the double-dealing of court politics. it is thus suggestive that wyatt’s line translates what is close to being the stated motive of petrarch’s poetry, manifest in rvf 293.10, “pur di sfogare il doloroso core” but announced much earlier in the collection, as we saw, with rvf 23.4, “perché cantando il duol si disacerba.” 14 just as the first poem in egerton takes up the topic of the injustice of love, which transfixes the speaker but leaves the lady untouched— an imbalance petrarch first records in rvf 2.13-14—the first sonnet in wyatt’s manuscript nods to a fundamental impulse driving petrarch’s poetic collection. the paradigmatic status of wyatt’s first proper sonnet in the egerton manuscript may also help to explain the placement of a poem found near the end of the shorter poems (m&t no. 81). wyatt’s strambotto, whose two first lines (“off cartage he that worthy warrier / could overcome, but cowld not use his chance”) imitate the first two lines of petrarch’s rvf 103 (“vinse hanibàl, e non seppe usar poi / ben la vittoriosa sua ventura”) adopts the same deductive logic of the contiguous rvf 102.9 (“et così aven…” vs. “and i like wise… “) to portray the tension between wyatt’s official diplomatic duties at the spanish imperial court humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 90 in 1537—which required simulazione—and a new love interest left behind in england, a tension made explicit in language that at once conflates and contrasts the uncertainties of political fortune with those of the heart’s desire (foley 52-53): so hangith in balance off warr, my pees, reward of all my payne; at mountzon thus i restles rest in spayne. (m&t 81.6-8) as we will see below, the “restless rest” of the last line is one of wyatt’s signatures, which surrey would seize on in glorifying his predecessor. although the egerton manuscript is a far cry from being wyatt’s canzoniere, the high finish of the poems transcribed by the amanuensis (continuously to poem 89 in m&t) suggests that at some point in its existence wyatt intended it as “an album of fair copies ready for final correction and polishing” (harrier 3). whether the poems are ordered by any principle other than sheer chronology appears unlikely (daalder), but an internal patterning among the poems might nevertheless be discernible. one example might be how the strambotto (m&t no. 81), with its use of a historical exemplum to model the speaker’s erotic circumstances, answers the poem regarding caesar and hannibal (m&t no. 3), itself based on the same juxtaposition, but in which the speaker’s erotic preoccupation remains obscured, possibly because the earlier love-sonnets in the collection concerned wyatt’s risky relations with anne boleyn (greenblatt 145-50; foley 99-101; walker 110-111, 286-92). from this perspective, the announcement of dissimulation in poem no. 3 is thematic for the collection. an equally intense existential situation gives rise to wyatt’s sonnet “the piller pearisht is whearto i lent,” not in the egerton manuscript, but in large part a translation of petrarch (m&t no. 236; thomson 188-89). the poem signals the low point of the poet’s circumstances after his patron and friend thomas cromwell was executed in 1543. the poem again illustrates the entangled relation of erotic and political contexts in wyatt’s verse, since he adapts rvf 269, “rotta è l’alta colonna e’l verde lauro,” the lament for the deaths of both laura and cardinal giovanni colonna, petrarch’s friend and patron, but leaves out references to the lady and the laurel as irrelevant to the shock of cromwell’s removal. in the rvf poem 269 is one of the first poems to register laura’s death (first mentioned in poem 267) and forms part of a suite of mourning poems including rvf 268 and 270 (martinez 10-23). as readers have observed, wyatt thus marks a personal catastrophe with a poem from that part of petrarch’s collection that demarcated what renaissance editors identified as the parts in vita and in morte of rvf (walker 279-82). wyatt’s first quatrain follows petrarch’s text closely, but the second departs from it; the third quatrain is a recognizable adaption of petrarch’s first tercet, while the last three lines are completely unrelated—as if wyatt wished to reflect in formal terms the omission of half of petrarch’s explicit content. wyatt also insists on an extreme display of sorrow, so that lines 10-12 dissolve into verbal redundancy: what can i more but have a woful hart, my penne in playnt, my voice in wofull crye, my mynde in woe, my body full of smart? humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 91 the lines deploy wyatt’s plain, monosyllabic native style, his “gauge of integrity” (greene, light 256), but upon inspection the verses prove surprisingly petrarchan in inspiration. their stimulus arrives not, however, from rvf 269 (petrarch’s line 11 mentions only “humidi… occhi” and “viso chino”) but from the contiguous rvf 268. cued perhaps by “questa è del viver mio l’una colonna” (268.48), which attributes to laura the column reserved for colonna in sonnet 269—that is, performs a shift of reference that wyatt’s poem precisely reverses—wyatt draws for his lines 11-12 on rvf 268.9-10 (“ogni mia gioia / per lo suo dipartire in pianto è volta”), which resonates in turn with wyatt’s lines 5-6: “… for happe away hath rent / of all my joye, the verye bark and rynde,” while 268.33 (“e questo solo anchor qui mi mantene…”) is far closer to wyatt’s line 2 (“the strongest stay of myne unquyet mynde”) than petrarch’s rvf 269.2, where tree and pillar cast protective shadows rather than acting as supports. most surprising, wyatt’s despairing final couplet, “and i myself, my self always to hate / til dreadfull death do ease my doleful state,” with its archaizing, alliterative pattern, is clearly an intensification of rvf 268.29-30: “ma io, lasso, che senza / lei né vita mortal né me stesso amo.” despite its absence from egerton, this sonnet also seems to find a consoling and specific answer in the final section of short lyrics in that manuscript, where wyatt in a more positive key affirms in the sonnet “if waker care” (m&t no. 97) his love for elizabeth darrell using a similarly plain style (“she hath in hand my witt, my will, and all”). the sonnet adopts for the four occurrences of the b rhyme in the quatrains (“playne,” etc.) the same rhyme as the couplet in “off carthage he” discussed above (“payne, spayne”), and an assonant final couplet (“staye, daye”). if petrarch closes his collection with a turn to the virgin, wyatt winds up the portion of egerton dedicated to shorter poems addressing a new lady love (braden, “wyatt” 251-52). the name of henry howard commands the title page of richard tottel’s songes and sonettes written by the right honorable lorde henry haward late earle of surrey, and other published in 1557. himself a descendant of edward i and iii, surrey’s notoriety as a martyred aristocratic antagonist of henry viii lent panache to the collection, published while the catholic mary tudor was still on the throne (marquis, “politics”; sessions 27377). in tottel’s volume, surrey’s glamour, and his first place in the order of texts, in part obscures the elder wyatt, a prudent gesture as thomas wyatt the younger had recently been beheaded as a rebel. but surrey’s conception of his task as a poet is in fact heavily dependent on the literary model suggested by wyatt’s imitations of petrarch. jonathan crewe is right to see in surrey’s treatment of wyatt virtually an attempt to transform himself into the elder poet (75-76). thus surrey lamented wyatt’s death in two sonnets (howard nos. 29, 30) and in an elegy in heroic quatrains published anonymously in 1542 (zitner; sessions 240-59; walker 377-413). another sonnet (howard no. 31, “the great macedon”) was inserted in the egerton manuscript to introduce wyatt’s terza rima versions of the penitential psalms (m&t 98). wyatt’s imitation of petrarch, “caesar, when that the traytour of egypt” (m&t no. 3) is echoed in one of the wyatt epitaphs (howard no. 29), and wyatt’s ‘the piller pearisht,” also imitated from petrarch, furnished the impresa of the broken column for the anonymous arundel castle painting of surrey surrounded by howard emblems, made in 1543, an image closely related to the howard heraldic claims surrey’s humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 92 enemies exploited to have him condemned to death (sessions 333-420, esp. 348-49, 369-72, 391-99). surrey was moreover probably responsible—a bold gesture of condescension for an aristocrat—for the publication of john leland’s latin panegyric naeniae to wyatt, where wyatt is represented as the founder, along with chaucer, of a national literature in emulation of the classics and the tuscan poets (foley 30-31, sessions 250-51). these formulations led directly to the positive estimates of surrey and wyatt in puttenham’s arte of english poesy in 1589, and of surrey in sidney’s defence of poesie in 1595, years when shakespeare is consolidating his career. surrey’s epigrammatic style, though markedly different from wyatt’s pithiness, consciously imitated that of the elder poet (heale 104) and reiterated some of wyatt’s characteristic verbal formulae, e.g. his characterization of court life as “the slipper wheele / of hye astate” (tottel no. 128.1-2; howard no. 13.49: “that slipper state i know”). the title of wyatt’s quyet of mynde, a translation from plutarch for queen catherine of aragon (walker 284-85), recurs as a formula in surrey (howard no. 23.32, “my restless mind”; no. 24.34, “my unquyet mynd”), in part because it recalls the sorrows of vergil’s dido, of which more below.15 such infusions of wyatt’s vivid phrases in surrey’s poems are consistent with the fact, as readers have noted, that several of surrey’s most effective poems are epitaphs: for wyatt, for surrey’s beloved squire john clare, and in a sense proleptically for himself (howard no. 26, no. 38). for surrey, the language of epitaphs is continuous with his affirmation of noble literary traditions; he thus adapts, for wyatt’s elegy (“the earth his bones, the heavens possesse his gost,” howard no. 28.38) and for clare’s (“norfolk sprang thee, lambeth holds thee dead,” howard 35.1), donatus’s famous epitaph for vergil: “mantua me genuit, calabri rapuere; tenet nunc parthenope.” 16 wyatt and surrey both translate rvf 140, “amor, che nel penser mio vive e regna,” the only instance of such duplication (m&t no. 4; howard no. 4; thomson 169-79). with its presentation of love in feudal and chivalric terms the poem had an obvious appeal to the two tudor poets, who inhabited, each at his different rank, a refeudalized absolute monarchy, and it follows that for each poet matters of loyalty and lordship guide their adaptations of petrarch’s sonnet. given that in wyatt’s version “love” is neither the first word nor immediately personified, the figure of love is demoted both in rhetoric and in rank. nor does wyatt, as surrey does, have love “raine and live,” but only “harbar” in his thought and “take up residence” in the speaker’s heart. wyatt’s love thus appears delegitimated, a challenger with “bolde pretence” to the lady’s regime of self-repression (m&t no. 4.7: “… rayned by reason, shame and reverence”). indeed, wyatt’s only instance of rayned alters its meaning by describing the restraints (“reins”) emanating from the lady, which in effect displace love’s power to reign and rule. defeated by the lady’s disapproval, love’s manifestation in the speaker flees to “the heart’s forest,” an expression, not found in petrarch, that makes of love’s latency a form of lurking in the wild, as if love were living in banishment as a brigand. wyatt’s final line, closely translating petrarch’s statement of the ethical dilemma of divided loyalties, “but in the field with him to lyve and dye,” again evokes a real, possibly remembered space of shared military adversity (petrarch gives only “star seco”). the poem ends less a love sonnet than a celebration of brothers-in-arms, humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 93 lending an air of outlaw activity to wyatt’s erotic adventures (greene, light 252-53, ferry 114-16, heale 96-97, foley 95). surrey’s version continues wyatt’s trend toward more concrete and experientially vivid feudal contexts: petrarch’s love armato is expanded to “clad in the armes wherein with me he fought.” 17 but the conclusion of surrey’s version modifies his models dramatically (lines 12-14): che poss’io far, temendo il mio signore, for my lordes gylt thus fawtless byde i payne: se non star seco infin a l’ora extrema? yet from my lorde shall not my foote remove. ché bel fin fa chi ben amando more. sweet is the death that taketh end by love. casting the scene as a suicidal last stand with a heart entirely pure is unalloyed howard mythmaking, a heroic and romanticized gesture authorized, beyond petrarch or wyatt, with a subtext from vergil’s aeneid. line 13 reflects aeneas’s promise to stay by his father anchises during the sack of troy, “mene efferre pedem, genitor, te posse relicto / sperasti …?” (aeneid ii.657-58; see howard 105), which surrey in his translation of the aeneid renders as: “father, thoughtst thow that i may ones remove … a foote, and leave thee here behinde?” (howard no. 41.864-66).18 indeed the preceding lines of aeneas’s account, as englished by surrey, are a precise gloss on surrey’s deepest motives: “driven i was to harness then againe, miserably my death for to desire. for what advise or other hope was left?” (howard no. 41.862-64). the idea of dying nobly for a lost cause resonated all too strongly with the aristocratic pretensions and cultural politics of the howards, attitudes increasingly risky in the final years of henry’s tyranny. much of surrey’s poetic program and aristocratic politics are thus implicit in line 13, “fawltless byde i payne,” a phrase nonexistent in petrarch’s text. surrey’s rhyme scheme is, anomalously for most sonnets, abab, cdcd, ecec, ff, with “payne” concluding the c rhymes that begin in the second quatrain. but the progress of the c rhyme into the sestet, though a fault in italian sonnet aesthetics, is part of surrey’s point. by insisting on the importance of the -ayne rhyme, surrey puts into high relief the distinctive “raine” in the first line and also links his sonnet metrically with his two elegiac sonnets for wyatt, which also bring a rhyme from the first two quatrains into the third.19 through a similar pattern of rhymes and other verbal echoes, further links to wyatt’s work and biography emerge in a sonnet of surrey’s with no known model, petrarchan or other, “the fansy which that i have served long” (howard no. 10).20 surrey’s final couplet, “where i am now, as restlesse to remayne, / against my will, full pleased with my payn”—another carefully crafted doublebind—echoes the first line of surrey’s own epicedium for wyatt in heroic quatrains, “here rests wyatt, who could never rest” and alludes to the conclusion of wyatt’s strambotto on his forced residence during his spanish embassy, “at mountzon thus i restles rest in spayne,” a situation existentially replayed by surrey’s own encampment “amiddes the hylles in base bullayn” (no. 10.12). the reiterated “restless rest” has special resonance as an humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 94 epigram for wyatt’s characteristically conflicted energy, indeed constitutes a behavioral impresa transferred into the language of surrey’s epicedium for wyatt from the epitaph of the celebrated italian general gian giacomo trivulzio, the victor of agnadello and marignano, who died in 1518: “hic mortuus requiescit semel / qui vivus requievit nunquam” (hudson 543). both the virgilian intertexts deposited in the petrarchan adaptations and the insistent associations with wyatt are aspects of surrey’s strategy of self-authorization, by which, as many readers have suggested, surrey fashioned what for eighteenth-century readers was the first flowering of a native english classicism (howard xi), while for william sessions (24059) surrey’s program aimed at nothing less than the renovatio of english poetry and english nobility. the strategy permeates surrey’s entire oeuvre and is the chief vector of his petrarchan adaptations, for surrey does not attempt close translations like those of wyatt. instead, in the case of two sonnets springing from petrarchan originals, “the soote season” (cf. rvf 310, “zefiro torna”) and “alas, so all thinges” (cf. rvf 164, “hor che’ l ciel”), he articulates his poems around the same virgilian locus classicus that organizes petrarch’s two sonnets: dido’s nocturnal anguish contrasted to the peaceful repose of nature (aen. iv.522-32).21 thus surrey transfuses into his own poetry not only aeneas’s heroic bravado, as in “love that doth rayne,” but petrarch’s recurrent staging of dido’s passion, which serves as an expression of surrey’s vulnerability and of that “unquyet mynde” (as we saw, a formula also imparted by wyatt). surrey’s petrarchan, but also vergilian, dantean, and chaucerian tradition—nor can wyatt be absent—is summarized in the first poem anthologized in tottel, a capitolo in terza rima that functions as a posthumous manifesto of surrey’s planned renovatio. though the poem proclaims an overt purpose of erotic persuasion (lines 50-51, “oneless this carefull song / prynt in your hert some percell of my will”) it is more the proclamation of a poetic and cultural program. that surrey’s “percell of my will” is echoed in tottel’s preface to the reader (“that to have wel written in verse, yea and in small parcelles, deserveth great praise”) brands the poem as the prime example of how english poets can match the “works of divers latines, italians, and other” (tottel 1). this attempt at the edification of a literary tradition through the emulation of latins and italians is visible in the translation of petrarchan passages where virgil is also implicit, and in surrey’s wielding of the terza rima, a gesture that does homage to wyatt, who first uses the form in english in his satirical epistles and penitential psalms, as well as to petrarch’s trionfi, a portion of which surrey translates in his “such waiward wayes has love” (howard no. 13, see 113-14)—and ultimately to dante. “the sonne hath twyse brought forthe the tender grene” is a catalogue of the speakerlover’s disquiet and alienation, a melancholy brought on by repression (“so doth each place my comfort cleane refuse”; see sessions 185-87). after a chaucerian opening imitated from troilus commenting on the approaching winter (v.8-11), the poem runs through a series of petrarchan borrowings: line 18, “at hand to melt, farr off in flame to bourne” originates in petrarch’s “s’arder da lunghe et agghiacciar da presso” (rvf 224.12, a poem translated by humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 95 wyatt); lines 21-29 follow the opening of petrarch’s first sestina, rvf 22.1-6, a borrowing that modulates seamlessly into surrey’s and me withdrawe from everie haunted place, lest in my chere my chaunce should pere to playne; and with my mynd i measure paas by paas to seke that place where i myself hadd lost… (howard no. 11. 32-35) these lines render the first quatrain of “solo e pensoso i più deserti campi / vo mesurando a passi tardi e lenti”—the only known translation into english of these lines until the eighteenth century—and, from rvf 175.1-2, “il tempo e’l loco / ov’ i’ perdei me stesso.” lines 40-43 develop the ship allegory (“my sayles do fall…”) familiar from chaucer’s and wyatt’s versions of rvf 189. finally, lines 47-49 derive from rvf 209.9-11: e, qual cervo ferito di saetta and yf i flye, i carrey with me still ch’el ferro avvelenato dentr’al fianco the venymed shaft which doth his force restore fugge, e più duolsi quanto più s’affretta by hast of flight… but surrey is also mindful of aeneid 4.69-73, which describes dido afflicted by love as a wounded deer (“qualis coniecta cerva sagitta…”), thus returning to the topic of dido’s nocturnal anxiety, already touched on in the borrowing from the sestina (line 24, “save i, alas, against all others use”) that renders petrarch’s adversative conjunction “et io…” (rvf 22.6), which echoes in turn vergil’s “at regina…” from aeneid 4.1 and 4.529. a half dozen petrarchan borrowings in a poem of 55 lines constitutes a tour de force of quasi-centonic poetry, but from the point of view of surrey’s politics, the poem exhibits more than poetic colors: the reference to long-hidden unhealed wounds (lines 5-6, “sins i have hidd under my brest the harme / that never shall recover helthfulness”) is a formula in surrey’s poetry for his long-simmering aristocratic resentment under the tudor yoke. sessions suggests that for surrey dido’s wound represents “the vulnerability of all human nature” (284-86) and thus it is no accident that surrey paraphrases, near the beginning of his capitolo, virgil, aen. 4.67 (“tacitum vivit sub pectore volnus”).22 the fixation on the wound also comes explicitly through wyatt. surrey concludes a strambotto with “but wiat said true, the skarre doth aye endure,” (howard no. 34) echoing, from wyatt’s double sonnet preserved in tottel (which is significantly given the profoundly petrarchan heading “the lover describeth his restlesse state”) 23 wyatt’s statement on the ineradicable scars of love: “from whence no toole away the skar can race” (tottel no. 105.14; see also m&t no. 101.910).24 the association of the wound, the stricken deer, and the vulnerability of even a royal self would return at the end of the century to inform hamlet’s satisfied observation of claudius’s conscience stung by the players’ performance of “the murder of gonzago”: “why, let the stricken deer go weep…” (hamlet, iii.ii.206). shakespeare’s petrarch berhymed if tottel’s anthology institutes a petrarchizing program, it also concludes an epoch: george watson (1-3) has commented that after tottel petrarch is rarely the object of direct humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 96 translation among english sonneteers, possibly for reasons of religion and ideology, since petrarch was a papist, but also possibly because translating petrarch is so difficult. in any case, after surrey’s establishment of the english sonnet including up to seven rhymes, there was no going back to the petrarchan sonnet in four or five rhymes that wyatt strove to master. despite this shift in his reception, petrarch’s reputation remained intact, even though the primary reason for invoking him is in order to rival or outdo him, or, as in sidney’s case, in order to accuse rivals of borrowing from him too liberally (astrophel no. 15.7-8). the idea of rivaling and besting petrarch did not escape shakespeare’s ambition. tottel’s songs and sonettes is mentioned in the first scene of merry wives, and one of its songs (no. 182) is paraphrased in hamlet’s gravedigger scene (v.i.55-62), suggesting shakespeare’s ownership of a book that had been reprinted eleven times from 1557 to 1593 and that included some thirty englished lyrics by petrarch. judging from shakespeare’s celebrated parody of fulsome petrarchan comparisons in one of his own sonnets, “my mistres eyes are nothing like the sunne” (no. 130), it has been convincingly argued that shakespeare knew the seventh poem in thomas watson’s collection hekatompathia (1582). significantly, the poem is placed amid a series of poems (nos. 5-8) that either translate or refer to petrarch (pearlman; mortimer 20, 63). most readers agree that shakespeare’s sonnets as published in 1609 betray scant employment of petrarch,25 although lines 11-12 of sonnet 130 itself, “i graunt i neuer saw a goddesse goe; / my mistres when shee walkes treads on the ground,” have been perceived as targeting petrarch’s praise of laura’s walk beginning the sestet of rvf 90 (“non era l’andar suo cosa mortale / ma d’angelica forma…”). if shakespeare did indeed fix on rvf 90 as symptomatic of petrarchan hyperbole, he showed a shrewd selectivity. it may be that the negations that articulate shakespeare’s sonnet (line 6, “but no such roses see i in her cheekes”) derive from petrarch’s strong negation, though with contrary intention, beginning his sestet—the very lines shakespeare imitates. in other words, petrarch is challenged on his own ground. but if shakespeare refuses to call his own mistress’s eyes solar, he does permit his character romeo to address juliet more than once as a sun (“it is the east, and juliet is the sun”) a comparison plausibly authorized by petrarch’s praise of laura in these terms (rvf 90.12-13: “… un vivo sole / fu quel ch’ i ‘ vidi.”).26 romeo and juliet is indeed more promising as a site of shakespeare’s confrontation with petrarch and petrarchism. the date of 1594 or 1595 for composition of the play would justify viewing the prominence of sonnet form and sonnet topics in the text as, in part, shakespeare’s response to the barrage of english sonnet sequences published between 1591 and 1594. in a larger sense it is part of the continuous exploitation of the sonnet that goes back to the many editions of tottel, the collections of thomas watson (1576, 1582), and the enhancement of petrarch’s status by his treatment as a past master in such works as leland’s eulogy for wyatt (1542), puttenham and sidney (parker 1939, harris, pearlman). the better sonnetteers of 1591-94 allude to petrarch, typically but once (e.g. sidney, astrophel no. 15; daniel, delia no. 35; drayton, ideas mirrour, dedication). thus it is striking that the only mention of an italian poet in shakespeare’s entire corpus is mercutio’s of petrarch, a humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 97 mention all the more significant, as peter holland notes in his introduction, considering the importance given to proper names in the play (shakespeare, romeo and juliet xxxvi): without his roe, like a dried herring. o flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified! now he is for the numbers that petrarch flowed in. laura, to his lady, was a kitchen wench (marry, she had a better love to berhyme her…"), dido a dowdy, cleopatra a gypsy, helen and hero hildings and harlots, thisbe a grey eye or so… (rom. ii.iv. 37-43) the single mention of petrarch may reflect that in shakespeare’s most immediate source for his script, broke’s versified romeus and juliet (published by tottel in 1562), it is another tuscan author, boccaccio, who is cited as fitter than broke himself to tell the tale.27 as in tottel’s two poems that name petrarch (nos. 188-89), mercutio sets up petrarch as the expert sonneteer and romeo as his inadequate challenger.28 the comparison implies that romeo, unmanned by love, is like the chaste petrarch who “flows in numbers” to “berhyme” his lady. both lady and lover are part of the competition, since the business of praising laura is one of coining comparisons (to dido, helen, hero, thisbe) to their detriment (they are mere “kitchen wenches”). mercutio’s mocking mention of petrarchan verse is a kind of fulcrum in the play for shakespeare’s engagement with petrarch’s text and example, and the insistence on the question of rival poets and rival ladies tips us off that the play itself is shakespeare’s bid to outdo petrarch within the arena of the sonnet and its poetics. as many readers have observed, the formal principle of the sonnet itself, in the form that surrey bequeathed to the elizabethans, has a prominent role in the play. complete sonnets appear both as the prologue to the play and, in the second quarto, at the beginning of act ii.29 some who write on this subject claim that after act ii shakespeare loses interest in the sonnet as a formal principle, or abandons it as verona descends into violence, as if the sonnet represented civic harmony: both ideas result from a limited view of what sonnet form could mean in shakespeare’s time. not only could “sonnet” refer to any short poem (as in the title to tottel’s collection), but typographical convention often isolated the sestet of sonnets from the octave, as occurs in sidney’s arcadia (1590 and 1593), thomas lodge’s rosalynd (1593) and drayton’s ideas mirrour (harris 467). more radically, watson’s translations of petrarchan sonnets expanded the form from quatorzains to three sestets (quatrains rhyming abab and an added couplet). what this means for shakespeare is that the final six lines of romeo and juliet, a quatrain and a couplet, functions as a sonnetfragment, or as a strambotto (the form cultivated by wyatt and surrey), concluding the work in the same way the sonnet-prologue begins it. in this light, a number of other passages are recognizable as sestets, or strambotti, including speeches by benvolio (i.ii.45-50), romeo (i.ii.90-95), and paris, this last late in the play (v.3.12-17) (shakespeare rom. xxxiv-v). thus in no sense does shakespeare forget about sonnet form after act ii, and the persistence of sonnet form is one of the ways in which, as anne slater as argued (132-36), a myriad of elements in the play realize the poetics of the sonnet, including its rhetoric, figurative language (e.g. oxymoron), and its implicit narratives. humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 98 the chief example of how shakespeare adapts the sonnet to the requirements of a play is of course the meeting of romeo and juliet (i.v.94-111), where shakespeare gives the first quatrain to romeo, the second to juliet, and shares the lines of the third quatrain between them (one to juliet, three to romeo); the witty final couplet is then divided between the two: [juliet]: “saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.” [romeo]: “then move not while my prayers’ effect i take.” (i.v.106-07) as if starting another sonnet, the pair then shares a further quatrain, alternating lines, but are interrupted by the nurse.30 in doling out the lines, shakespeare uses the articulations of the form to suggest the coming together of the pair and the joining of their hands and lips: some modern stage directions indicate the kiss after the first line of the additional quatrain, but the kiss must occur immediately after romeo’s “i take,” with the physical kiss mirroring the conclusion of the couplet, a conceit that the new quatrain continues, such that the first hemistich of its last line is divided by the second kiss (“‘give me my sin again’”).31 “you kiss by th’ book,” juliet’s remark chiding romeo’s facile expertise, alerts the reader to the literary artifice of the scene, with its conceited metaphors (pilgrims, hands, lips, etc.), and juliet’s casuistical defensive reasoning (“palm to palm is holy palmer’s kiss”) (rom. xxxiv). but the sonnet transgresses the petrarchan canons that mercutio, in chiding romeo in act ii.v, mistakenly applies to a romeo no longer besotted with rosalind. in having romeo and juliet touch hands and touch lips, shakespeare flouts petrarchan prohibitions as does sonnet 130, where unlike the ethereal laura, shakespeare’s love “treads on the ground.” the sonnet itself is the weapon of choice in shakespeare’s duel with petrarch, in whose songbook love never touches the pitch of the physical. the meeting of the lovers is the most important scene in the play, since everything follows from it: everything also follows, therefore, from the kiss that the sonnet enacts. shakespeare indicates the generative implications of the scene for the plot by placing just before the sonnet tybalt’s hostility to romeo’s attendance at the capulet feast and his vow of revenge in terms that defy the hospitality old capulet offers romeo: “this intrusion shall / now seeming sweet, convert to bittrest gall” (i.v.92-3)—terms that nevertheless remain within a sonnet idiom and which then recur in the sonnet opening act ii.i.14, “tempering extremities with extreme sweet.” just after the shared sonnet in act i the lovers realize that their love spawns oxymora and contradiction (i.v.119-20: “is she a capulet? / o dear account, my life is my foe’s debt”) and (i.v.139; “my only love, sprung from my only hate”), and this predicament too appears in the act ii sonnet, where the lovers must “steal love’s sweet bait from fearful hooks” (line 8). long recognized as a chief example of petrarchan rhetoric in the play (slater 132-33), these oxymora begin with romeo’s outburst in act i.i.174-197. watson is again the probable immediate source (hekatompathia 18 and 98), but also the vector through which romeo’s account of “brawling love, o loving hate” pays homage to the “icy fire” of the same petrarchan topos that animates wyatt’s version of rvf 134 (m&t 25: “i fynde no peace and all my warr is done”) and possibly even reaches back to the last line of chaucer’s version of rvf 132 (“for hete of cold, for cold of hete i dye”). in friar laurence’s metaphor of raging eros (“violent delights”) shakespeare develops an image of love as an explosive force (ii.vi.9-11: “like fire and powder, / which as they kiss, humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 99 consume”), so that the lovers’ physical kiss, the verbal kiss of the couplet, and the metaphorical “kiss” of explosive, fatal eros are on a figurative continuum that realizes the compressed force of the english sonnet couplet as developed by wyatt, surrey, and their heirs. mercutio’s mockery of romeo’s lovesickness offers further clues to how shakespeare mines the cardinal difficulty of sonnet form—its rhyme scheme—for vigorous verbal effects in the play. mercutio allows that laura had “a better poet to berhyme her”; even before that he had conjured romeo to “appear though in the likeness of a sigh; speak but one rhyme, and i am satisfied. cry but ‘ay me,’ pronounce but ‘love’ and ‘dove’” (ii.i.8-10), unaware that romeo had already fulfilled this task in the previous scene (i.v.49: “so shows a snowy dove trooping with crows”). shakespeare turns into a rich poetic resource the acoustic effects of reiterated rhymes as well as the stereotypical syllables of a lover’s lament.32 mercutio’s “ay me,” emerges right on cue in juliet’s meditation overheard by romeo below her balcony (ii.ii.25: “‘ay me!’” “‘she speaks’”), and shortly thereafter she characterizes romeo’s consent to her love—which she assumes is done lightly—with the same word (ii.ii.90, “i know thou wilt say ‘ay’”). exemplifying what we might call the insistence of the letter in the shaping of character and plot, the lovers use the punning “ay” ( = “i”) in passages rich with dramatic irony and authorial self-reflexiveness: the nurse had prophesied juliet’s erotic predisposition as a child, in her answer of “ay” to the nurse’s remark that she would one day fall backward (i.iii.42-50), while romeo’s first “ay” identifies him as a reader—of amatory verse, no doubt—when asked to decode the list of guests to capulet’s ball (i.ii.61-62: “ay, if i know the letters and the language.”).33 “ay” is thus fateful, and its fatality, in both senses of the word, is announced in mercutio’s punning use of italian “hai” to mark a rapier’s fatal thrust (ii.ii.26). the gravity of the term is confirmed when juliet fears to hear the “ay” that will certify romeo’s death after the brawls in verona’s streets (iii.ii.45-47): “say thou but ‘ay,’ and that bare vowel shall poison more / than the death-darting eye of a cockatrice”; also 48: “i am not i, if there be such an ‘ay’…” in a deeper sense, shakespeare’s punning on ay/i inherits the turn toward “the inward language” of tudor subjectivity explored by wyatt and surrey (greenblatt 155), as in lines such as “withoute iyen i se; and withoute tong i plain” from “i fynde no peace,” an insistence on the first-person pronoun that results in part from translation, as the subject pronoun is normally suppressed in italian. but juliet’s conclusion to the same speech also alerts us to another crucial series of rhymes in the play (iii.ii.50-51): “if he be slain, say ‘aye’: if not, ‘no.’ / brief sounds determine of my weal or woe.” to focus on a term so natural to a tragedy as “woe” might seem pointless. but the word’s onomatopoeia proclaims its poetic usefulness. it may also have carried petrarchan associations in 1595, thanks to sidney’s dismissal of “poor petrarch’s long-deceased woes” (astrophil 15.7) and its prominence in the versified “passions” of thomas watson already identified as targets for shakespeare’s transformative wit (hekatompathia 18, 98: shakespeare’s own sonnets 44, 90, and 127 use woe in the final couplet). scrutiny of the play suggests a careful strategy to shakespeare’s deployment of “woe” and of thematically significant terms rhyming with it: “foe,” but also, of course, the name “romeo,” used over humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 100 thirty times in the play but rarely in rhyme. when tybalt espies romeo at capulet’s feast he brands him “montague, our foe,” rhyming with “that villain romeo.” mercutio’s prose chaffing of romeo’s petrarchism, quoted above, concludes with the phrase “thisbe, a gray eye or so” rhyming with “signor romeo” (ii.iv.42-43). in this same speech romeo’s name is the emblem of his own sorrow, for mercutio’s claim that he lacks his “roe,” his masculine sexual heft, exposes the petrarchan melancholy embedded in the remaining oh me of his name, a lament that also complements juliet’s “ay me” and presages his future griefs. when mercutio is killed, shakespeare has his name rhyme with that of romeo, as if as a parting verbal embrace of the two friends (iii.i.143-4). although there are further important uses of “woe,” as when the newlyweds contemplate their separation (iii.v.35-36: “lighter and lighter it grows / more dark and dark our woes”), shakespeare rhymes “woe” with romeo’s name only once, and this occurs in the final couplet of the play, where, as we saw, the formal principle of the sonnet, in this case a sestet or strambotto, and a rhetorical principle, the emulative comparison identifying a superlative, reach a simultaneous consummation: “for there was never story of more woe / than this of juliet and her romeo.” 34 as we saw, the powerful closure obtained with this rhyme is prepared from the beginning of the play (its first appearance is at i.i.78-79) and it attests to shakespeare’s understanding of the challenge of the english sonnet: finding and placing the rhymes, the “berhyming” of it, in short, with a view to setting up the final couplet. the triumph of the couplet is thus also the triumph of english sonnet form and formalizes the supersession of petrarch, just as on the level of content shakespeare’s married romeo outperforms petrarch’s chaste lover. much more could be said regarding shakespeare’s exploration of romeo as a petrarchan persona informed by the english sonnet tradition. one of the striking continuities in shakespeare’s treatment of his male protagonist is the use of the trope of the lover as a ship in describing romeo’s destiny. first deployed as romeo approaches the capulet’s ball (i.iv.112-113: “but he that hath the steerage of my course, / direct my sail”), it recurs as he prepares to drink poison (5.3.117-18: “thou desperate pilot, now at once run on / the dashing rocks thy seasick weary bark”), thus framing his amatory life within the terms sketched out in petrarch’s rvf 189. shakespeare’s practice was stimulated by broke, who repeatedly applies the trope to romeo (broke 9, 13, 30, 51), but shakespeare was likely not unaware that the ship-allegory of the lover ultimately derives from petrarch, mediated by chaucer’s second canticus troili and wyatt’s “my galy charged with forgetfulness.” 35 other passages where the rosalind-besotted romeo behaves in extreme petrarchan fashion, albeit mocking the mannerisms of a mutable infatuation, also reveal shakespearean uses of topics from sonneteering tradition. mercutio’s remarks on romeo transfixed by love’s arrow and rosalind’s invulnerability to it are commonplaces (i.i. 207-15; i.iv.19-22; ii.iv.13-16), but they are emblematic ones, and they link romeo specifically to rvf 2.13-14 (translated, anonymously, in tottel, no. 227), to troilus smitten by criseyde in chaucer’s romance, and to wyatt’s “behold, love” beginning the egerton manuscript. montague’s observation that romeo repairs in the morning to his darkened room is in the spirit of petrarch’s sonnet on his chamber and his bed, his cameretta (rvf 234), a poem imitated by wyatt in three stanzas of rhyme royal (tottel, no. 67, using the same measure chaucer used for rvf 132), and humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 101 marked by the “unquyet mynde” formula (67.4: “quieter of mynde, mine unquiet fo”). indeed, the whole account given by benvolio of romeo’s solitary morning walks and concealment in the woods (i.i. 17-42), a disappearing act romeo repeats just after capulet’s ball (ii.i.30-42), is arguably an homage to surrey’s capitolo where it draws on rvf 6 (“solo e pensoso”) and 22 (“a qualunque animale”), passages the more conspicuous given that surrey’s capitolo holds first place in tottel’s anthology.36 in short, shakespeare’s account of romeo as a petrarchan lover owes a debt to surrey’s own extensive self-fashioning,37 and both acts of myth-making draw, directly and through intermediaries like broke, on chaucer’s troilus as the model of the noble lover undone by frustrated love and frustrated ambition.38 viewed from this angle, shakespeare’s sonnet tragedy is a lineal descendant of chaucer’s petrarchan translations in troilus and criseyde. 1 see levenson 24, also ferry 73, citing tottel no. 206.35-36. 2 in a forthcoming study, alison cornish, drawing on the translation theory of walter benjamin, argues that boccaccio and petrarch, along with dante, avoided volgarizzamento in favor of translation directed to produce a new, living work. 3 coluccio salutati’s latin version of this hemistich (“si fors non sit amor,” drawn from an earlier version of the sonnet) appears consistent with chaucer’s (see wilkins 169; rossiter 119); on the poetic quaestio, see petrarca canz. 643; kaylor cites boece i, pr. 4: 201 (“and yif god ne is, whennes comen gode thynges?”) as impinging on chaucer’s translation. cf. boccaccio, filostrato 6.15.1-2, which conforms to the usual reading. 4 cf. dante’s “dolce ber che non m’avria mai sazio” (purg. 33.138). 5 for petrarch’s treatment of the canzone stanza, see durling in this volume. rossiter (117) suggests that chaucer might have read rvf 189 transcribed as two adjacent seven-line blocks, possibly suggestive of his own seven-line stanza; this is not the format used for sonnets in the chigi ms., however. for the implications of sonnet transcription formats, see storey in this volume. 6 if in possession of a complete petrarch, chaucer could of course have seen boccaccio’s incipit to filostrato v.62 as rvf 70.40. 7 see santagata’s note to 105.90 (petrarca 501) for this predicament in rvf (e.g. rvf 182.5) 8 on the debate, see balduino, velli 183-99, branca 323-25, santagata 246-70, petrarca canz. 520-21; tonelli 206-219. 9 on the complex placement of these poets as subjects in tudor society and power politics, see greenblatt 126-39, 154-56, ferry 107, heale 87, and foley 37. 10 seventy-eight poems of 280 in the second edition give “the lover” as subject of the poem’s heading. see kamholtz, tottel xv-lxii; marquis, and especially marquis, “politics,” on the implications of revisions in tottel’s second 1557 edition. 11 muir and thompson, collected poems of sir thomas wyatt (hereafter m&t) print the poems of the egerton ms. in order, with some slight modifications concerning the end of the manuscript; see m&t, xi-xii. humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 102 12 on wyatt’s poetic language as conditioned by his diplomatic skill, see greenblatt 139-45, heale 97, 104, foley 22-25, crewe 46, and walker 335-50. it was probably during wyatt’s diplomatic missions to france in 1526 and rome in 1527 that he encountered copies of rvf. 13 only one attestation in oed previous to wyatt’s use: “disgorgith their veneme” (skelton, 1529). 14 tottel’s anonymous version of rvf 23 (no. 154) makes this line the poem’s incipit, “syth singyng gladdeth oft the harts.” 15 the “unquyet mind” of course also evokes augustine’s “inquietum cor noster” (confessions i.1), a text that informs petrarchan self-consciousness. 16 on the clare sonnet-epitaph, see zitner; crewe 64-65; on surrey’s windsor poems, sessions 108-139. for zitner, surrey’s application of the virgilian epitaph to clare, never a poet, suggests the epitaph rebounds on surrey himself (524-25). 17 ferry 114-16; see sessions 207 on surrey’s highly successful jousts in 1540 in honor of anne of cleves. 18 on the aeneid translations, published by tottel in the same year as songes and sonnettes see sessions 268-77. 19 see in “in the rude age” (howard no. 30, d rhyme -ayme from the second quatrain is also in the third; e rhyme is ayle, assonant with -ayne, -ayme); “dyvers thy death” (howard no. 29: first quatrain b rhyme -edd, also in third quatrain; final couplet rhyme -ayle). tottel gives as surrey’s first line “love that liveth and reyneth in my thought” and “corrects” to playnes and pains the second set of rhymes on -ayne in the third quatrain, obscuring the affiliation with the sonnets for wyatt. 20 petrarchan topics are echoed, however: the first line rephrases rvf 140 translated by wyatt, and lines 8-9, “…alas, those dayes / in vayn were spent…” evoke rvf 1.13-14. 21 the sonnets are also linked by anomalous rhyme schemes: “soote season,” three quatrains abab, cdcd, etc., and couplet aa; “alas, so all thinges,” three quatrains abab, etc., and couplet bb, suggesting that the poems are complementary by design. 22 surrey in his version of aen. 4.83 renders the lines as “whiles in the breast the silent wound keeps life”; see sessions 272-73. 23 tottel includes six headings that describe poems as voicing the “restless state” of the lover: nos. 1, 4, 24, 67, 104, 156. 24 wyatt versifies “etiam sanato vulnere, cicatrix manet,” attributed to publilius syrus and used in texts of canon law, to denote the persistence of infamy after penance and absolution. the relevance of the concept, given wyatt’s and surrey’s imprisonments, is obvious. thanks to justin steinberg for bringing the legal concept to my attention. 25 an echo of rvf 1.9-10 (“ma ben veggio or sì come al popol tutto / favola fui gran tempo…”) has been detected in the opening of sonnet 110 (“alas ‘tis true, i have gone here and there / and made my selfe a motley to the view”): see rollins, cited in braden 163. 26 the sun as object of comparison is a fixture of romeo and juliet: see i.i.117, i.ii.94-95, ii.ii.2-4, ii.iii.1-6, iii.ii.1-4, iii.v.1-36, etc. 27 broke, p. 1, line 15: “which boccace scant, not my rude tongue, were able forth to tell.” humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 103 28 compare tottel no. 188.1-3: “o petrarke hed and prince of poets al, / whose lively gift of flowing eloquence / wel may we seke…”; and line 13: “but ther was never laure more then one.” but no. 189.11 in tottel claims that laura has been excelled; “if lawra livde she would her cleane deface” (heale 105). samuel daniel acknowledges his insufficiency as the berhymer of delia in no. 35.3 of his 1592 collection: “though thou a laura hast no petrarch found.” 29 broke’s poem also begins with a preface consisting of a pair of sonnets and a sonnetargument (lxvii-lxix; see harris 455-56). 30 on this sonnet and sonnet poetics in romeo and juliet in general, see colie 143-44, foster 51, laird 206-07, levenson 23-28, whittier 35-36, vendler 166-68. 31 for the placement of the kiss, see franson 2-3. the kisses may echo sidney’s sonnets ending with astrophil kissing stella, e.g. 73,74, 79, 80, 81,84, the only “conquest” of astrophil’s courtship. 32 on acoustic effects in the play, see slater 142-44 and patricia parker 368. for shakespearean autobiography in romeo and juliet see brezius 23-25. 33 the list has thirteen proper names; paris makes fourteen (i.ii.22-23; but the real fourteenth is romeo); on the number fourteen in relation to juliet’s age and association with the sonnet, see whittier 40, and franson 2-3, 6. 34 broke’s ending does not rhyme on the name: “there is no monument more worthy of the sight / than is the tombe of juliet and romeus her knight”(112). 35 old capulet’s use of the ship-allegory for juliet at iii.v.130-39 (“in one little body / thou counterfeit’st a bark, a sea, a wind”) is taken by slater as an allusion to wyatt’s version of rvf 189 (capulet’s mention of it emphasizes his age) (129). see also laird 208. 36 thomson cites john harington, in the preface to orlando furioso in english heroical verse of 1591, describing dante’s selva oscura as “that wandring wood of which the dolefull petrarke complaines so often in those his sweet mourning sonets…” (174). 37 on elizabethan fictions about surrey, including thomas nashe’s portrait of the earl as the lover of the “tuscan” geraldine, see sessions 187-92. 38 surrey imagined himself a troilus during his happy youth at windsor (howard no. 27.4); the dead faithful shepherd of howard no. 16, a projection of surrey, is buried next to troilus. works cited alighieri, dante. commedia. ed. maria rosa chiavacci leonardi, 3 vols. bologna: zanichelli, 1999-2001. print. balduino, armando. “reminiscenze petrarchesche nel filostrato (e sua datazione).” in boccaccio, petrarca e altri poeti del trecento. florence: olschki, 1984. 231-47. print. barkan, leonard. the gods made flesh: metamorphosis and the pursuit of paganism. new haven: yale up, 1986. print. humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 104 boitani, piero. chaucer and the italian trecento. cambridge: cambridge up, 1983. print. ---. the tragic and sublime in medieval literature. cambridge: cambridge up, 1989. 56-74. print. boccaccio, giovanni. caccia di diana; filostrato. ed. vittore branca. milan: mondadori, 1990. print. braden, gordon. “shakespeare’s petrarchism.” in shakespeare’s sonnets: critical essays. ed. james schifter. new york and london: garland, 1999. 163-83. print. ---. “wyatt and petrarch: italian fashion at the court of henry viii.” annali d’italianistica 22 (2004): 237-65. print. branca, vittore. boccaccio medievale e nuovi studi sul decameron. florence: sansoni, 1996. print. [broke, arthur] brooke’s ‘romeus and juliet’ being the original of shakespeare’s ‘romeo and juliet.’ ed. j.j. munro. london: chatto and windus, 1908. print. bretzius, stephen. “joel fineman’s ‘shakespeare’s will.’” in shakespeare in theory: the postmodern academy and the early modern theater. ed. stephen brezius. the university of michigan press, 1997. 23-37. print. chaucer, geoffrey. canterbury tales. the new riverside chaucer. ed. larry benson et al. boston: houghton mifflin, 1987. 23-328. print. ---. troilus and criseyde. benson, new riverside chaucer. 471-586. colie, rosalie. shakespeare’s living art. princeton: princeton up, 1974. print. collected poems of sir thomas wyatt. ed. kenneth muir and patricia thomson. liverpool: liverpool up, 1969. print. cornish, alison. vernacular translation in dante’s italy: illiterature literature. cambridge: cambridge up, forthcoming. print. crewe, jonathan. trials of authorship: anterior forms and poetic reconstruction from wyatt to shakespeare. berkeley and los angeles: university of california press, 1991. 36-76. print. daalder, joost. “are wyatt’s poems in egerton ms. 2711 in chronological order?” english studies 69 (1988): 205-23. print. daniel, samuel. delia. contayning certayne sonnets: vvith the complaint of rosamond. london: j. c. for s. waterson, 1592 (facsismile edition: scolar press, 1969). print. diani, dominique. “pétrarque: canzoniere 132.” révue des études italiennes n.s. 18 (1972): 111-65. print. drayton, michael. ideas mirrour, amours in quatorzains. london: james roberts, 1594. print. ferry, anne. the inward language: sonnets of wyatt, sidney, shakespeare, donne. chicago: university of chicago press, 1983. 71-118. print. humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 105 foley, stephen. sir thomas wyatt. boston: twayne, 1990. print. foster, leonard the icy fire: five studies in european petrarchism. london: cambridge univ. press, 1969. print. franson, j. karl. “‘too soon marr’d’: juliet’s age as symbol in romeo and juliet.” papers on language and literature 31 (summer 1996): 1-14. web. 21 dec. 2010. <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3708/is_199607/ai_n8743141/>. greenblatt, stephen. renaissance self-fashioning. chicago: university of chicago press, 1980. 115-56. print. greene, thomas. “petrarch and the humanist hermeneutic.” in italian literature: roots and branches. eds. giosuè rimanelli and kenneth atchity. new haven: yale up, 1976. 21024. print. ---. the light in troy: imitation and discovery in renaissance poetry. new haven: yale up, 1982. 242-63. print. harrier, richard. the canon of sir thomas wyatt’s poetry. cambridge, mass.: harvard up, 1975. print. harris, william o. “early elizabethan sonnets in sequence.” studies in philology 68 (1971): 451-69. print. heale, elizabeth. wyatt, surrey, and early tudor poetry. chicago and london: the university of chicago press, 1983. 71-113. print. howard, henry. earl of surrey, poems. ed. emrys jones. oxford: oxford up, 1964. print. hudson, h.h. “review of tottel’s miscellany 1557-87, by h.e. rollins.” modern language notes 45 (1930), 541-43. print. kamholtz, j.z. “thomas wyatt’s poetry: the politics of love.” criticism 20 (1978): 349-65. print. kaylor, jr., n. h., “boethian resonance in chaucer’s canticus troili.” chaucer review 27 (1993): 219-27. print. laird, david. “the generation of style in romeo and juliet.” journal of english and germanic philology 63 (1964): 204-13. print. levenson, jill l. “the definition of love: shakespeare’s phrasing in romeo and juliet.” shakespeare studies 15 (1982): 21-36. print. lodge, thomas. rosalynd. euphues golden legacie. london: thomas orwin, 1590. reprinted in the complete works of thomas lodge. ed. edmund gosse, 4 vols. glasgow: hunterian club, 1883. vol. i, 117-18. print. ---. phillis honoured with pastorall sonnets, elegies and amorous delights. john busbie, 1593. reprinted in elizabethan sonnets. vol. ii. ed. sidney lee. westminster: archibald constable, 1904. print. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3708/is_199607/ai_n8743141/ humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 106 marquis, paul a. “recent studies in richard tottel’s songes and sonnettes.” english literary renaissance 28 (1998): 299-313. print. ---. “politics and print: the curious revisions to tottel’s songes and sonettes.”studies in philology 97 (2000): 145-64. print. mclaughlin, martin. literary imitation in the italian renaissance. oxford: oxford up 1995. 22-48. print. martinez, ronald l. “mourning laura in the canzoniere: lessons from lamentations.” modern language notes 118 (2003): 1-45. print. mason, h.a. humanism and poetry in the early tudor period. london: routledge & kegan paul, 1959. print. mortimer, anthony, ed. petrarch’s canzoniere in the english renaissance.. amsterdam and new york: rodopi, 2005. print. natali, giulia. “a lyrical version: boccaccio’s filostrato.” in the european tragedy of troilus., ed. piero boitani. oxford: clarendon press, 1989. 49-74. print. parker, patricia. “shakespeare’s sound government: sound defects, polyglot sounds, and sounding out.” oral tradition 24 (2009): 359-72. print. parker, w.r. “the sonnets in tottel’s miscellany.” pmla 54 (1939): 669-77. print. pearlman, e.h. “watson’s hekatompathia in the sonnets and romeo and juliet.” english studies 74 (1993): 343-51. print. petrarca, francesco. canzoniere. ed. marco santagata. milan: mondadori, 1996. print. ---. le familiari [familiarum rerum libri xxiv]. ed. vittorio rossi, 4 vols. (vol. 4 ed. umberto bosco). florence: sansoni, 1933-1942. print. ---. petrarch’s lyric poems: the rime sparse and other lyrics. ed. and trans. robert m. durling. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1976. print. picone, michelangelo. “il sonetto clxxxix.” lectura petrarce 9 (1989): 151-77. print. pigman iii, g. w. “versions of imitation in the renaissance.” renaissance quarterly 33 (1980): 1-32. print. puttenham, george. the arte of english poesy. ed. frank whigham and wayne rebhorn. ithaca: cornell university press, 2007. print. powell, jason. “thomas wyatt’s poetry in embassy: egerton 2711 and the production of literary manuscripts abroad.” the huntington library quarterly 67 (2004): 261-82. print. rossiter, william t. chaucer and petrarch. cambridge: d.s. brewer, 2010. print. santagata, marco. per moderne carte: la biblioteca volgare di petrarca. bologna: mulino, 1990. 246-70. print. humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 107 sessions, w.a. henry howard, the poet earl of surrey: a life. oxford: oxford up, 2003. print. shakespeare, william. romeo and juliet. ed. peter holland. new york: penguin, 2000. print. ---. shakespeare’s sonnets, a facsimile of the chalmers-bridgewater copy (aspley imprint) of the 1609 quarto, in the huntington library. converted into digital format by r.g. siemens. calgary, ab: u of alberta, 1998. web. 21 dec. 2010. <http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/sonnets/sonnets.html>. ---. the most excellent and lamentable tragedie of romeo and iuliet. london: thomas creede, 1599. internet shakespeare editions. victoria, bc: university of victoria, 18 dec. 2009. web. 21 dec. 2010. <http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/library/facsimile/bookplay/bl_q2_rom/rom/>. sidney, sir philip. astrophel and stella, prepared from alexander b. grosart’s the complete poems of sir philip sidney [1877] by risa s. bear at the university of oregon. eugene: university of oregon, 1995. web. 21 dec. 2010. <http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/stella.html>. ---. the defence of poesie, 1595. menston: scolar press, 1968. print. slater, anne p. “petrarchanism come true in romeo and juliet.” in images of shakespeare, proceedings of the third congress of the international shakespeare association, 1986. ed. werner habicht, d.j. palmer and roger pringle. cranbury, nj: associated university presses, 1988. 129-50. print. smith, hallett. “the art of sir thomas wyatt.” huntington library quarterly 9 (1946): 32355. print. stillinger, tom. the song of troilus: lyric authority in the medieval book. philadelphia, pa.: university of pennsylvania press, 1992. print. thomson, patricia sir thomas wyatt and his background. london: routledge & kegan paul, 1969. 149-208. print. tonelli, natascia. “petrarca (rvf 2-3), boccaccio e l’innamoramento nel tempio.” studi sul boccaccio 28 (2000): 198-219. print. tottel, richard. richard tottel’s songes and sonettes, the elizabethan version. ed. paul a. marquis. tempe, arizona: renaissance english text society and medieval and renaissance text society, 2007. print. tromly, frederic b. “surrey’s fidelity to wyatt in ‘wyatt resteth here.’” studies in philology 77 (1980): 376-87. print. velli, giuseppe. “la poesia volgare di boccaccio e i ‘rerum vulgarium fragmenta’ : primi appunti.” giornale storico di letteratura italiana 169 (1992): 183-99. print. vendler, helen. “shakespeare’s other sonnets.” in in the company of shakespeare: essays on english renaissance literature in honor of g. blakemore evans. ed. thomas moisan and douglas bruster. cranbury nj: associated university presses, 2002. 161-76. print. http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/sonnets/sonnets.html http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/library/facsimile/bookplay/bl_q2_rom/rom/ http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/stella.html humanist studies & the digital age ronald l. martinez 1.1 winter 2011 108 vergil. publi vergili maronis opera (aeneis pp. 82-338). ed. j. conington. new york: harper and brothers, 1894. print. walker, greg. writing under tyranny: english literature and the henrician reformation. oxford: oxford up, 2005. print. wallace, david. chaucerian polity: absolutist lineages and associational forms in england and italy. stanford: stanford up, 1997. print. watson, george. the english petrarchans: a critical bibliography of the canzoniere. london: warburg institute, 1967. print. watson, thomas. the hekatompathia or passionate centurie of love. manchester: charles s. simms, 1869-71 (reprint of 1581 edition). print. whittier, gayle. “the sonnet’’ body and the body sonnetized in romeo and juliet.” shakespeare quarterly 40 (1989): 27-41. print. wilkins, e.h. “cantus troili.” english literary history 16 (1949): 167-73. print. [wyatt, sir thomas]. sir thomas wyatt, the complete poems. ed. r.a. rebholz. harmondsworth, england: penguin, 1978. print. zitner, s. p. “truth and mourning in a sonnet by surrey.” english literary history 50 (1983): 509-29. print. francis, thou art translated: petrarch metamorphosed in english, 1380-1595 ronald l. martinez, brown university petrarch in troilus and criseyde trial by sonnet: wyatt and surrey shakespeare’s petrarch berhymed works cited humanist studies & the digital age, 4.1 (2015) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.4.1.3584 digital readers of allusive texts: ovidian intertextuality in the commedia and the digital concordance on intertextual dante julie van peteghem abstract: this essay introduces the notion of a digital concordance as a reading and research tool to explore intertextual passages online, and illustrates how a digital concordance of highly allusive texts can change how we read and research such texts. i take as example the digital concordance on intertextual dante, a project on digital dante (digitaldante.columbia.edu) developed in collaboration with the center for digital research and scholarship at columbia university, which in the first phase highlights the ovidian intertextuality in dante’s divina commedia. the essay traces the history of the scholarship on dante’s ovid, identifying its strengths and limitations, especially of the concordances in print. since the intertextual passages in the commedia require a reading not restricted to the obviously corresponding verses, but attentive to the broader textual contexts, i show how the digital concordance on intertextual dante greatly facilitates such a contextualized reading. the visualization of the corresponding passages (side by side, highlighted, within context) and the search options (by category of text reuse or by canto/book/poem) help the study of (ovidian) intertextuality in the commedia, as illustrated with examples from the site. readers of dante’s divina commedia have often felt the need to provide glosses and notes to the poem for fellow and future readers. the commentary tradition on the commedia started just a few years after the completion of dante’s poem and is still ongoing. one sort of additional information these commentaries include is the clarification of where and how dante uses theological, classical, and vernacular sources in the commedia. sometimes this information is collected in separate concordances, which list passages in dante’s commedia and the corresponding source texts. now that the contemporary reader can easily access the text of the commedia and the commentaries online, the concordance is to follow.1 this essay introduces the concept of a digital concordance through the example of intertextual dante, a reading and research tool to explore intertextual passages in dante’s commedia online, which i developed in collaboration with the center for digital research and scholarship at columbia university and is part of the renewed digital dante website (digitaldante.columbia.edu). i place this notion of a digital concordance within the history of studying intertextuality in dante’s commedia, from the first mentions in the commentaries to the existing concordances in print, and illustrate how technology can be used to incorporate the strengths of that long tradition and overcome its limitations. as the first phase of intertextual dante highlights ovidian intertextuality in the commedia, this will be the focus of this essay. http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ http://digitaldante.columbia.edu/ http://digitaldante.columbia.edu/ humanist studies & the digital age van peteghem 4.1 (2015) 40 studying ovidian intertextuality in dante’s commedia in the most general formulation, intertextuality is concerned with the reuse of a passage from one text in another. quotations, imitations, reminiscences, echoes, allusions are all specific kinds of text reuse, but some of these are more easily defined than others. quotations, for instance, are easily understood as the verbatim repetitions of phrases or sentences, while the difficulty of precisely defining allusions (broadly, instances where the reuse is not direct or explicit) goes to the heart of the theoretical questions of what intertextuality exactly is and does. are these similarities between texts just an inevitable feature of literature, as some theorists of intertextuality have it, or are they the result of an intentional reuse by the author, who had another text on his or her mind while writing? or is intertextuality solely created by the reader who notices the connection and gives meaning to the reuse of an old passage in a new context (coffee et al. 419)? there is no critical consensus on these issues other than a shared concern that this kind of research needs to go beyond the detection of instances of intertextuality, and mainly focus on the new meanings the text reuse creates. in this essay, i use “intertextuality” and “text reuse” interchangeably to indicate the general phenomenon, and “allusion” for any instance in which the text reuse is not made explicit by exact word repetition or by the author’s mentioning the source. dante’s divina commedia is a highly allusive text: dante works with nearly fifty different sources (but only identifies a few), and more than a tenth of the entire poem features text reuse of some sort.2 among dante’s source texts, the work of the latin poet ovid occupies a distinct position. as teodolinda barolini pointed out, “ovid is one of the poets dante most uses, but— with respect to other major poets—least acknowledges” (dante’s poets 196). vergil is the only latin author dante works with more than ovid, but while vergil became the pilgrim’s guide virgilio for almost two canticles of the commedia and dante calls his work a model (for himself in inf. 1.82-87, and for statius in purg. 21.94-102), ovid only briefly appears as a character in inf. 4.90 and dante tells him in inf. 25.97-102 that his own work is better.3 we know dante had direct knowledge of ovid’s writings: in his treatises and letters he often quotes ovid and several italian phrases from the commedia come close to being literal translations of ovid’s latin. but while at times dante borrows ovid’s language and characters in an explicit and straightforward manner, far more often the text reuse takes the form of allusions tucked away into the text of the commedia. not surprisingly, then, readers of the commedia have often wanted to identify, organize, and define this vast amount of ovidian material. in the commentaries on the commedia, the main focus was for a long time on the identification of dante’s source texts. i illustrate this by looking at the commentaries on one of the two cantos that mentions ovid by name, canto 25 of the inferno. in this canto, dante tells ovid to be silent about his characters cadmus and arethusa: his descriptions of transformation in the commedia outdo those of the latin poet (inf. 25.97-102).4 it is now well understood that dante used several ovidian stories to shape the transformations in this canto, which creates tensions with dante’s claims of originality and authority over ovid.5 the first commentators, however, focused on the identification of the ovidian characters mentioned by dante (cadmus and arethusa) and other passages that showed similarities with ovidian verses. their comments demonstrate a good knowledge of ovid’s writings: they include the precise book and verse numbers of cadmus’s and arethusa’s stories in the metamorphoses, paraphrase their stories often at great length, and humanist studies & the digital age van peteghem 4.1 (2015) 41 mention other works by the latin poet. for instance, one of the earliest commentators, guido da pisa (1327-28) refers to or cites passages from ovid’s fasti (in his note on 25.25-27) and the heroides (in his note on inf. 25.58-60). that last reference is also the first time a commentator on inf. 25 establishes a connection between dante’s language in the commedia and his ovidian source text. many commentators will do that after him, bit by bit revealing how much the images of dante’s metamorphoses described in this canto are similar to ovid’s transformation stories of salmacis and hermaphroditus (first noted in 1440 by guiniforto delli bargigi, comment on inf. 25.46-57) and cadmus and harmonia (first noted in the commentary by giovan battista gelli [1541-63] on inf. 25.136-41). while some commentators further explore the connections between the two texts in more depth,6 the general tendency is to write about intertextuality in the shortest possible way: the identification of the corresponding passages without much more explanation. toward the end of the nineteenth century, a series of studies marked the growing interest in identifying and organizing dante’s sources in a much more systematic way: for instance, luigi venturi’s le similitudini dantesche (1874) organizes dante’s similes in the commedia thematically and identifies dante’s sources; gioachino szombathely’s dante e ovidio (1888) goes through the metamorphoses book by book, listing and discussing all corresponding passages in the commedia; edward moore’s scripture and classical authors in dante (1896) dedicates individual chapters to the influence of scripture, classical texts, and christian authors from late antiquity on dante’s writings, and includes indexes of quotations for each source text. these works, especially moore’s, became at their turn frequently mentioned in the commentaries, and provided later scholars with extensive materials for a more focused and reflective approach to the study of intertextuality in the commedia. before turning to the scholarly writings that resulted from this initial work of identification and organization, a short note on methodology. after all, the work of scholars such as venturi, szombathely, and moore is one of interpretation as well, the result of their choices of what and what not to include, according to their own definition of intertextuality. unfortunately, in these early works this definition is not always clearly specified: only moore explicitly explains the rationale behind his system used for the indexes of quotations. (while moore uses the word “quotations” to describe the content of his lists, it would be more precise to call them concordances – lists of corresponding passages in dante’s writings and his source texts – of which quotations are only a part.)7 for these concordances, he divided the pairs of passages into three categories: “direct citations,” “obvious references or imitations,” and “allusions and reminiscences” (4, 45-46). at the same time, moore is the first to temper the importance of this system of classification, admitting that he himself had often hesitated when classifying an entry (46). for his study of ovid’s influence on dante’s commedia, the added value of these categories is limited: with hardly any direct citations, about two out of three ovid-inspired lines in moore’s concordance fall under the category of “obvious references or imitations,” a broad definition that covers many different uses of ovid’s texts.8 more than a century after moore’s impressive study, steno vazzana’s dante e la “bella scola” (2002) includes a new “indice di concordanze,” lists of corresponding passages in dante’s commedia and the works of several latin authors. in his concordance the majority of the ovidian lines come from the metamorphoses, but it also includes many new passages from all of humanist studies & the digital age van peteghem 4.1 (2015) 42 ovid’s other works. unlike moore, vazzana does not categorize the entries or explain his criteria for inclusion. only in the introduction, does he point out – and then only briefly -that his focus will be mainly on language (10). between the publication of moore’s and vazzana’s concordances, scholars had proposed to structure the ovidian material in the commedia according to principles of organization other than verbal similarities. for instance, michelangelo picone took a thematic approach, characterizing ovidian myths in the commedia as “objective” (i.e., explaining historical facts) or “subjective” (i.e., explaining the experience of the pilgrim) (“l’ovidio di dante” 126); madison u. sowell found ovidian myths that run “horizontally” through the cantos and “vertically” through the canticles of the commedia (10); kevin brownlee proposed to distinguish between ovid-inspired characters, similes, and similes regarding the pilgrim (“dante and the classical poets” 113). picone, sowell, and brownlee did not systematically apply their proposed categories to the ovidian material in the commedia, but their writings nevertheless show a continued interest in giving structure to it. picone’s and sowell’s essays belong to a distinct group of writings that give short general overviews of dante’s use of ovid’s oeuvre: introductory essays, book chapters, and dictionary entries, often with the title “dante’s ovid” or a variant of it.9 not all of these essays propose categories to structure the ovidian material in dante’s writings, as picone’s and sowell’s essays did. but most of them share a focus on ovid’s metamorphoses and dante’s inferno. a clear exception is the most recent essay of this type, warren ginsberg’s “dante’s ovids” (2011), which calls attention to the different phases in both ovid’s and dante’s literary careers. in addition to these short overviews that describe the general traits of dante’s use of ovid, the scholarship includes a much larger corpus of essays that break down this subject into very specific topics, such as dante’s reuse of a particular ovidian story, or ovid’s influence on a canto or series of cantos. in the early 1990s, two collections of such essays (jacoff and schnapp; sowell) shifted the focus from studying ovidian intertextuality in dante’s inferno to the other two canticles, arguing that ovid’s influence is equally present in purgatorio and paradiso – if not more. while this was an important new direction in the scholarship, the majority of the close readings still focus on ovid’s metamorphoses and dante’s commedia, and not their other writings. one of the intertextual dante project’s goals is to further broaden the scope of this analysis and eventually feature the complete oeuvres of dante and of the authors he reuses in his writings. another important common thread through these close readings is the attention given to the larger context of the ovidian episodes that dante selected (instead of focusing only on the corresponding passages, which, as we saw before, was the way most commentators wrote about the subject). in an essay on dantean intertextuality, christopher kleinhenz convincingly argues that dante intended his citations in the commedia to be interpreted with attention to the broader textual context (184-85). he illustrates this with a passage in purg. 2: when a boat of souls approaches mount purgatory, dante notes that they were singing the psalm in exitu israel de aegypto “con quanto di quel salmo è poscia scripto” (“with what is written after of that psalm” [purg. 2.48]). in other words, dante is telling us that not only the quoted opening words but the entire text of the psalm are relevant for the understanding of the citation in this canto. this example features a citation, the most direct form of including source texts, but we should also look at what is “written after” for the more obscure intertextual passages in the commedia, humanist studies & the digital age van peteghem 4.1 (2015) 43 where dante does not cite his sources. as we will see later in the discussion of intertextual dante, it is one of the main features of the digital concordance to facilitate this kind of contextualized reading of dante’s source materials. these two short forms of writing – the general overviews and the close readings of specific passages – together with the concordances and the notes on ovidian source passages in the commentaries make up the current state of the scholarship on dante’s ovid. the topic has clearly received plenty of scholarly attention, but ultimately the literature still remains somewhat fragmented, probably because of the lack of a comprehensive study on the subject. the specificity of certain contributions (the notes in commentaries, and, to some extent, the close readings) usually leaves little room to reflect on the general traits of dante’s use of ovid; the general overview essays are often too partial to dante’s use of the metamorphoses and their short format at times leads to inevitable overgeneralizations; the concordances offer completeness but little to no interpretation. rooted in this tradition of studying dante’s ovid, the digital concordance on intertextual dante builds on the scholarship’s strengths and uses the advantages of a digital approach to reading and researching texts to address its shortcomings. intertextuality and the digital humanities digital humanities research on intertextuality continues to study how texts are reused in other texts, but now with the prospect of exploring much larger corpora than previously possible. projects focus on the detection of (new) instances of intertextuality, and the visualization and searchability of the results, both those obtained by human compilation and those obtained through computational models. the switch from traditional to digital approaches to the study of intertextuality comes with new questions about definition and methodology. where it is possible to compile a print concordance of corresponding passages or write an essay on an intertextual passage without defining what is precisely understood by “intertextuality,” technology cannot be involved to detect instances of intertextuality without a clear definition of what such an instance should look like. as we saw before in the first section of this essay, text reuse takes different forms: it ranges from the obvious to the oblique, from quotations (the literal reuse of words or phrases from one text into another) to allusions (the more obscure instances where the reuse is not direct or explicit). different digital approaches are needed to detect them. within the digital framework, it has become possible to search large text corpora for the precise recurrence of words and phrases, and use the results to make observations and interpretations of various aspects of text reuse: the new context in which the copied passage is inserted, the distribution of borrowed quotations within a text, tracking how a certain word or phrase is reused over time – to name a few of the aspects that tools such as philologic, etraces, and antconc can explore. allusions, on the other hand, are much more difficult to discover in both the traditional and digital setting: for human readers it requires an extensive and thorough understanding of all the texts involved, and the difficulty of formulating what counts as an allusion (a problem the quotations do not pose) is one that the researcher writing the computational model to detect such instances cannot avoid. nevertheless, even models for this more difficult form of digital detection have yielded promising results: the method to detect allusions in latin poetry developed by coffee et al. for the tesserae project searches for at least two-word phrases with the same lemmas at the sentence level (adhering to the “traditional humanist studies & the digital age van peteghem 4.1 (2015) 44 scholarly identification of loci similes, which takes two-word pairs as the most basic and common form of intertextuality” [386]); the method proposed by bamman and crane focuses on the use of identical words, word order, syntactic similarity, metrical and phonetic similarity, semantic similarity (“logic and discovery of textual allusion”). an additional difficulty for the automated detection of text reuse arises when the source and target texts are not written in the same language. again, literal translations of phrases and sentences from one language into another will be easier to discover than instances where an author writing in one language just alludes to a sentence originally written in another. not surprisingly, models addressing multilingual text reuse have been more successful in detecting the former than the latter (bamman and crane, “discovering multilingual text reuse”).10 when thinking about intertextuality in dante’s commedia within a digital context, two interconnected issues immediately arise. in short, these are that the majority of instances of intertextuality in the commedia are cross-language quotations and allusions. as pointed out before, dante rarely quotes from his latin or vernacular sources, and rarely literally translates any of his non-italian source texts. most of the time, he transforms his latin sources in his italian poem in a rather oblique way, and often his text reuse runs over more than one sentence. thus, the instances that we would expect a computational model to detect are actually the ones that are the hardest to discover by human or machine reading. to work with the two languages in this case would require a digital translation lexicon (latin-modern italian for the latin sources, and medieval italian-modern italian for the commedia) and a strong computational model that can address all these difficulties. for the moment, these resources are not available. looking forward, with those elements in place, the commedia would be a good text for testing new models of text reuse detection: as we saw in the first section of this essay, there already exists a significant amount of research on the topic with which to compare the automatically obtained results. but for the reasons here listed, intertextual dante is a digital project that right now solely works on searching and visualizing the intertextual passages that i compiled. the digital concordance on intertextual dante the intertextual dante project is part of the renewed digital dante website (digitaldante.columbia.edu). in the early 1990s, jennifer hogan developed one of the first online dante resources together with columbia university’s institute for learning technology. the new iteration of digital dante under the editorship of teodolinda barolini is a collaboration between the department of italian at columbia university and the center for digital research and scholarship (cdrs) and the humanities and history division at columbia university libraries/information services. intertextual dante, which i developed together with cdrs, is one of the new digital projects on the site.11 intertextual dante features a reading and research tool – a digital concordance – that offers new ways to explore dante’s reuse of other texts in the commedia. the ultimate goal is to create digital editions of the divina commedia and dante’s other works that offer the most complete overview of dante’s reuse of his source texts, when at the same time also allowing for very specific searches and attention to the textual context. while the site will of course become more powerful and insightful as more texts are added, the first phase of the project focuses on ovidian http://digitaldante.columbia.edu/ humanist studies & the digital age van peteghem 4.1 (2015) 45 intertextuality in the commedia. at its core, intertextual dante still contains lists of corresponding passages in dante’s commedia and his source texts, just like a concordance in print. but on intertextual dante these corresponding passages, the entries of the concordance, are visually represented side by side and can be searched in various ways. in what follows, i describe how the digital concordance on intertextual dante addresses the limitations of concordances in print and functions as a research tool. on the opening page of intertextual dante two columns feature the complete text of dante’s commedia (left column) and of his sources (right column). these text columns are scrollable and the clickable tables of contents (far left and right side) allow users to jump to specific passages within the texts (see fig. 1). in the intertextual dante editions of the commedia and dante’s source texts each entry of the concordance is marked with the icon of a manicule, a nod to the drawings of a hand with pointing finger indicating noteworthy passages in medieval and renaissance manuscripts. clicking on this icon will highlight the entire passage in one text and scroll up or down in the other text column to the corresponding passage, which will be highlighted as well (see fig. 2). figure 1. current opening page of intertextual dante. in the center, the two scrollable columns contain the text of dante’s commedia, starting with the inferno (left column), and ovid’s works, starting with the amores (right column). the clickable tables of contents (far left and right side) are the first way in which the entries on intertextual dante can be searched: one can look for intertextual passages in a specific canto of the commedia or book, poem, letter, or story by ovid. at the bottom of the page, the dropdown or drop-up menus (depending on the browser) contain all entries belonging to the different categories of text reuse: word choice, character, event, place, and simile. humanist studies & the digital age van peteghem 4.1 (2015) 46 figure 2. view after the icon of the manicule next to inf. 1.4 is clicked. the two corresponding passages (inf. 1.4-6 and tr. 3.6.29-30) are highlighted and aligned. the tables of contents indicate the canto number (dante’s inferno 1) and the precise book, poem, letter, or story by ovid (tristia 3.6). in the text box on top of the page, a comment explains the connection between the two texts and contexts and specifies to which category of text reuse the entry belongs. one can scroll up or down to read dante’s canto and ovid’s letter in their entirety. on intertextual dante the commedia and dante’s source texts can thus be read side by side in the order desired. in contrast, concordances in print need to commit to one order and as a result can only highlight one direction of the intertextuality: they first list the passages from ovid in the order they appear in his texts and then all corresponding passages in dante’s works (which highlights the popular ovidian passages), or the other way around (which makes it easy to see where dante works with ovid the most).12 the digital concordance, on the other hand, gives the option to decide on the starting point of the search: for instance, one can start reading the text of dante’s inferno, easily see where the intertextual passages are (all indicated in the texts with the icon of a manicule), and look up the corresponding passages in ovid’s works, or start with ovid’s texts and search for passages dante reused. this gives the reader more complete information about the distribution of ovidian material in the commedia: the changing presence or absence of manicules indicates which are the “ovidian” cantos in the commedia and which ovidian texts appealed more or less to dante. the two-column organization on intertextual dante makes it possible to move back and forth efficiently between the commedia and dante’s source texts. humanist studies & the digital age van peteghem 4.1 (2015) 47 once a manicule has been clicked and the corresponding passages appear side by side on the screen, this presentation greatly facilitates the kind of contextualized reading that, as i argued earlier, the discussion of dante’s text reuse requires. the digital concordance on intertextual dante indicates precisely where the corresponding passages are found in both works: it gives the larger ovidian textual context from which dante excerpted the passage as well as the entire episode of the commedia in which the ovidian passage is reused. in other words, the corresponding passages are literally placed into context. by scrolling up and down in both text columns, one can immediately read what came before and after the highlighted passages in both texts and determine how much of this surrounding text is relevant to the interpretation of the text reuse. in the text box on top of the page a brief comment explains the connection between the two texts and contexts (see fig. 2). these are remarkable departures from the concordances in print, which only give the references to the two corresponding passages and, in contrast to the digital concordance, exist completely outside of the textual context. to facilitate a reading that is even more attentive to the context, all works displayed in the columns are broken down into textual divisions: dante’s commedia into canticles and cantos; ovid’s fasti and ars amatoria into books, his amores into the individual poems, the heroides, tristia, and the epistulae ex ponto into the individual letters, and his metamorphoses into books and stories. as pointed out before, the clickable tables of contents make it possible to search specifically for these divisions (see figs. 1 and 2). further search options are available in the menus on the bottom of the page, addressing the different kinds of text reuse in the commedia (see fig. 1). the scope is to highlight the distinctive traits of how dante works with his source texts throughout the three canticles: not all instances of text reuse are equal, and sheer numbers easily mask significant differences among them. intertextual dante categorizes the entries of the concordance, using a new system to do so. language remains the overarching criterion: verbal similarities between the passages in dante’s commedia and his source texts. in that respect, this approach does not differ too much from moore’s, which tries to indicate how certain it is that dante had ovid in mind, or vazzana’s, which also focuses on linguistic similarities. but instead of further dividing the entries based on the degree of closeness between the corresponding passages (which, as we have seen in the discussion of moore’s concordance, yields limited results for an author such as ovid), i work with three categories that illuminate specific stylistic, structural, and rhetorical aspects of dante’s text: word choice, characters/place/events, and similes. working with these criteria, i collected and evaluated the entries from the works on ovidian intertextuality in the commedia by szombathely, moore, paratore (“ovidio e dante”), and vazzana, and complemented them with own findings. whereas dante’s more obvious reuse of ovid’s works includes names of characters, places, or events, the “word choice” category contains the more obscure instances that are tucked away into the text of the commedia. in most cases, there are at least two verbal connections (literal translations or synonyms in italian) between ovid’s and dante’s texts (in that respect, this approach resembles coffee et al.’s, whose algorithm searches for at least two matches of dictionary headwords in both source and target texts, with the difference that i do not limit the text reuse to the sentence level as they did), but sometimes it can be just one word that establishes the connection. however, this concordance does not include the literal translation of humanist studies & the digital age van peteghem 4.1 (2015) 48 one latin word into dante’s italian, if that word is found in other latin authors besides ovid. for instance, when dante writes, “sì come neve tra le vive travi / per lo dosso d’italia si congela” (“even as snow among the sap-filled trees / along the spine of italy will freeze” [purg. 30.8586]), his use of the word “travi” stands out because it is a hapax in the commedia and clearly a latinism. but these verses should not be included in a concordance merely because ovid uses the original latin word “trabs” in a passage for which no connection to dante is found – especially since the word is found in other latin writers.13 characters/events/places is the second category; the reader can look for their recurrence throughout the commedia. the criteria for inclusion are the same as for the word choice category: for instance, the shared mention of a classical character’s name is not sufficient to establish a connection between ovid’s and dante’s texts; dante needs to include particular words or details to indicate that ovid’s latin text, and not another version of the story, was his source of inspiration. for example, despite the fact that the giant cacus is mentioned in texts by livy, horace, vergil, and ovid, dante includes particular details about cacus’s death (inf. 25.25-33) that allow us to identify ovid’s fasti as his source text. of course dante often combines different sources in a single passage; but at this point, the concordance only indicates his ovidian sources. similes are the third and last category. also here only those instances are included where dante’s language indicates his knowledge of the source texts. given that the simile is a highly distinguishing feature of dante’s writing, it is informative to dedicate a separate category to them.14 in fact, while the strongest presence of ovid’s texts is found in inferno (i.e., the highest total number of instances), dante uses ovid-inspired similes constantly throughout the commedia, inserting a similar amount in all three canticles. this is the sort of nuance that gets lost when just looking at the general numbers of intertextual passages, while on intertextual dante it is possible to carry out more specific searches within those entries of the concordance. in sum, these are the search options on the current site: users of the digital concordance can explore the different categories of text reuse (in the menus on the bottom of the page) or look up specific parts of dante’s or ovid’s works (in the text columns or in the tables of contents); by clicking an entry they can display on the screen any two corresponding passages side by side, highlighted, and within context. (in a later phase of the project, a separate search page will be added.) now let us look at some concrete examples of the kind of reading and interpretation this digital concordance facilitates and favors. on intertextual dante, the first instance of ovidian intertextuality in the commedia is already found in the second tercet of the inferno (see fig. 2). after the opening tercet, where we find the pilgrim lost in the dark wood, dante the author writes how difficult it is to describe that moment: “ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura / esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte / che nel pensier rinova la paura!” (“ah, it is hard to speak of what it was, / that savage forest, dense and difficult, / which even in recall renews my fear” [inf. 1.4-6]). the corresponding passage in ovid’s writings (from the “word choice” category) is: “mensque reformidat, veluti sua vulnera, tempus / illud, et admonitu fit novus ipse pudor” (“my mind shrinks from those days as from wounds, at the mere reminder / my shame flares up afresh” [tr. 3.6.29-30]).15 in print the concordance (first included in vazzana 147) reveals only this bit of information, the similar language at the humanist studies & the digital age van peteghem 4.1 (2015) 49 sentence level: in both excerpts the authors look back at a moment in the past and retelling that memory renews the feeling they then experienced. the digital concordance, on the other hand, presents the texts side by side and situates both passages within the narrative units from which they were excerpted. it is already interesting that the first ovidian source text dante works with in the commedia is not the expected, much more used metamorphoses. that he selected a passage from ovid’s tristia, the letters written during his exile in tomis near the black sea, is quite a meaningful choice. even though in the narrative of the commedia (set in 1300) the pilgrim’s exile is presented as a future event, it was a harsh reality for dante composing his poem (from 1308 on). the prophecies of his future exile in the commedia are dante’s direct way of incorporating this event in his poem; the reuse of ovid’s exile writings is indirect. in tristia 3.6, the letter from which dante selected a passage, the exiled ovid writes to a dear friend about his mistake (“error” [tr. 3.6.26]) that forced him to leave rome, if it can be called a mistake – “stultitia” or foolishness would be a better word (tr. 3.6.35). ovid even asks if “every good and advantageous path” is closed (“omne bonae claudent utilitatis iter?” [tr. 3.6.16]), which brings dante’s “diritta via . . . smarrita” (“lost the path that does not stray” [inf. 1.3]) in mind. this is one of the letters in which ovid addresses, be it in vague terms, the reason for his exile, the extreme harshness of his punishment, and the despair it caused him. the user of the concordance on intertextual dante finds this content by scrolling up and down in the text of ovid’s letter on the site. for the interpretation of the verbal similarities between dante’s inf. 1.4-6 and ovid’s tr. 3.6.29-30, the themes of this ovidian letter need to be taken into consideration as well. by reusing those ovidian verses, i argue, dante also evoked the broader themes of ovid’s letter: immediately at the opening of the commedia, he identifies himself with ovid as a fellow undeserved exile. dante explicitly calls himself an “exul immeritus” in the salutations of several letters written in exile (epistles iii, v, vi, and vii); a contextualized reading of dante’s reuse of verses from one of ovid’s exile letters reveals how in a subtle but powerful manner he does the same at the very opening of his poem. besides providing the opportunity to read the corresponding passages in context, the digital concordance also has the option to search for specific divisions in the source texts (e.g., a poem from the amores, a letter from the heroides, a book of the fasti), and see where they reappear in dante’s commedia, or the other way around. to illustrate the potential of such searches, we return to canto 25 of the inferno, the example in the discussion of the commentaries on the commedia in the first section of this essay. there we already saw that dante mainly worked with two ovidian stories to structure the metamorphoses in his canto: the story of salmacis and hermaphroditus (met. 4.274-388) for the transformation described in inf. 25.49-93, and the story of cadmus and harmonia (met. 4.563-603) for the one described in inf. 25.103-41.16 searching the concordance for these passages in ovid’s metamorphoses, one finds this information, but also that dante uses the story of salmacis and hermaphroditus in three more passages in the inferno. we will focus here on the first two instances, which are found toward the end of the same canto 25, where we note the similarities between inf. 25.94-102 and met. 4.276 (see fig. 3), and between inf. 25.142-44 and met. 4.284 (see fig. 4). humanist studies & the digital age van peteghem 4.1 (2015) 50 figure 3. the corresponding passages inf. 25.94-102 and met. 4.276. figure 4. the corresponding passages inf. 25.142-44 and met. 4.284. humanist studies & the digital age van peteghem 4.1 (2015) 51 once again, the full scope of dante’s text reuse only becomes clear when reading the ovidian verses in context. met. 4.276 and met. 4.284 are the first and last verses of the introduction to the story of salmacis and hermaphroditus, told by alcithoë, one of the three daughters of minyas or minyades (met. 4.276-84). refusing to participate in the festivities for bacchus in their town, the minyades stay at home, weaving and telling stories instead. in this frame story of the storytelling sisters, ovid introduces the theme of poetic novelty: before telling their tales, the minyades openly discuss the requirements of a good story, turning the passage into a metanarrative reflection. defining what constitutes good storytelling in the metamorphoses, the sisters repeatedly stress the importance of originality. the first sister goes through a list of possible stories she could tell (met. 4.43-52) and eventually picks the story of pyramus and thisbe, “quoniam uulgaris fabula non est” (met. 4.53), because it is not well-known. similarly, the second sister alcithoë rejects “uulgatos” or “common” stories (met. 4.276) and selects the story of salmacis and hermaphroditus based on the criterion of novelty (met. 4.276-84).17 in these passages, ovid is obviously alluding to the callimachean trope of novelty –the view that a poet should always walk untrodden paths (anderson 417). according to callimachus, short writings should strive for innovation; ovid, however, applies callimachus’s principle in a fifteen booklong epic composed of more than one hundred stories skillfully woven together. the passage of the storytelling minyades is one of the metanarrative moments in the metamorphoses where ovid through the voice of his characters addresses this poetics of novelty. the metanarrative tone of the ovidian passage resonated with dante, who in inf. 25 also makes the case for a new and novel way of writing about transformation, different from the traditional metamorphosis stories by lucan and ovid. from alcithoë’s introductory remarks to the story of salmacis and hermaphroditus, dante selected two key words that allowed him to evoke the same tone and connect each reuse from this ovidian story to his own poetic message in the commedia. more specifically, in her introduction alcithoë says that she will keep silent (“taceo”) about well-known stories (met. 4.276), just as dante tells lucan and ovid to be silent (“taccia”) about their common and ordinary stories of transformation (inf. 25.94-102) (see fig. 3). instead of the same old love stories, alcithoë promises a story with “dulci nouitate” (“sweet newness” [met. 4.284]);18 at the end of canto 25 dante uses “newness” as the excuse if his pen had wandered off: “qui mi scusi / la novità se fior la penna abborra” (inf. 25.143-44) (see fig. 4).19 these are two instances where the text reuse is established on the basis of just one repeated word: novelty (ovid’s “nouitate” and dante’s “novità”) and silence (ovid’s “taceo” and dante’s “taccia”). there is of course a grammatical difference between alcithoë’s simple present “i keep silent” and dante’s exhortative subjunctive “let [lucan / ovid] keep silent.” at a first reading, each passage represents a different rhetorical trope: the ovidian “taceo” together with “non loquor” (met. 4.279) and “praetereo” (met. 4.284) turn alcithoë’s introduction into a praeteritio, the rhetorical trope of mentioning without mentioning; dante’s repeated “taccia” is the italian version of the latin taceat topos, a formula used to express poetic superiority over predecessors (curtius 162-65). but taking all ovidian elements in this canto into consideration, we see that dante’s passage functions exactly like alcithoë’s praeteritio. while mentioning the stories she will not tell, alcithoë gives a short summary of each of these stories (met. 4.277-83). similarly, by silencing the poets lucan and ovid and their characters he will surpass, dante names the very stories and authors that turn out to be fundamental to the shaping of his own metamorphoses in the commedia (inf. 25.94-102): as mentioned before, dante based the transformations in this humanist studies & the digital age van peteghem 4.1 (2015) 52 canto on the ovidian stories of salmacis and hermaphroditus and cadmus and harmonia (and also lucan was a source text). dante’s repeated reuse of elements from the story of salmacis and hermaphroditus, highlighted by the digital concordance, suggests that dante selected this ovidian story not only for its imagery, but also for its metapoetic reflections on tradition and innovation. the digital concordance on intertextual dante also indicates where dante uses two or more ovidian sources for the same passage in the commedia. this gives interesting insights into dante’s technique of working with his sources. take for instance canto 30 of the inferno, which opens with two long similes based on ovidian stories. in the first simile (inf. 30.1-12), dante compares the rage of the falsifiers found in this canto to the rage of king athamas. turned insane by juno, athamas killed his son learchus (thinking he was a lion cub); his wife ino saved their other son by jumping together off a cliff. the concordance shows that dante works with two ovidian source texts here: the story of athamas as told in the metamorphoses (4.416-562) and the version in the fasti (6.485-500).20 by looking at the two source texts, we can see how dante took over elements from both to create his simile in the commedia. from the version in the metamorphoses (see fig. 5), he reused athamas’s words: “io, comites, his retia tendite siluis! / hic modo cum gemina uisa est mihi prole leaena” (“huntsmen, your nets! and spread them over these woods here! / look! i’ve sighted a lioness, there with two of her cubs!” [met. 4.513-14]), which in the commedia became: “tendiam le reti, sì ch’io pigli / la leonessa e ’ leoncini al varco” (“let’s spread the nets, to take the lioness / together with her cubs along the pass” [inf. 30.7-8]). this is one of the instances where dante comes close to translating ovid’s latin verses into the italian of the commedia. humanist studies & the digital age van peteghem 4.1 (2015) 53 figure 5. the corresponding passages inf. 30.1-12 and met. 4.512-30. the passage in the fasti does not show such close verbal similarities with dante’s text, but it was undoubtedly a source text for dante. looking at the passages side by side, we notice that dante structured his simile in exactly the same way as ovid’s account in the fasti (see fig. 6). ovid first gives the reason for juno’s anger (jupiter’s love affair with semele, ino’s sister and athamas’s sister-in-law, and the fact ino took care of semele’s and jupiter’s son bacchus [6.485-88]); he then describes athamas’s madness and the murder of their son learchus (6.48992); and narrates how ino saved herself and their other son melicertes by jumping in the sea (6.493-98). in almost the same amount of verses (14 verses in ovid’s fasti, 12 verses in dante’s commedia), dante follows the same narrative outline: juno’s anger because of semele (inf. 30.13), athamas’s madness and the killing of learchus (inf. 30.4-11), the unnamed ino who saves the second child (inf. 30.12). from this example we learn that dante is as familiar with ovid’s fasti as with the metamorphoses, and that this familiarity is not only seen in verbal similarities but also in the reuse of the narrative structure and sequence of events. it will be interesting to further explore dante’s technique of combining sources, when more texts will be added to intertextual dante. humanist studies & the digital age van peteghem 4.1 (2015) 54 figure 6. the corresponding passages inf. 30.1-12 and fasti 6.485-98. as we have seen in these examples, the digital concordance on intertextual dante makes it possible to carry out very specific searches and pay close attention to the broader textual context of the ovidian passages dante selected in the commedia, just as dante himself did. throughout his works, dante reveals himself to be a very attentive reader of the latin poet: his text reuse of ovid is not an act of anthology – plucking meaningful but isolated words and phrases – but rather a careful process of responding to larger passages and stories within ovid’s texts. a simple comparison between the obviously corresponding passages in ovid and dante is thus not sufficient to describe dante’s close engagement with ovidian material. as the ovid scholar charles segal wrote, “context is an important clue to ovid’s mood and meaning” (262) – something dante realized centuries earlier. the digital concordance on intertextual dante allows us to focus precisely on that. humanist studies & the digital age van peteghem 4.1 (2015) 55 notes  the intertextual dante project was conceived while i was working on my dissertation (2013), and is first outlined in its conclusion. the lists of the ovidian passages in the commedia, included in appendix, were the basis for the entries of the digital concordance on intertextual dante. parts of this essay are based on that study, such as the system to categorize the different kinds of text reuse, which are also used on the site. i developed intertextual dante in collaboration with the center for digital research and scholarship at columbia university (2014). 1 the text of the commedia can be consulted online on several websites, including the digital dante site to which the intertextual dante project belongs. the dartmouth dante project includes over seventy-five commentaries on the commedia, which also can be consulted at their dante lab digital workspace. the most recent commentary on the commedia, teodolinda barolini’s commento baroliniano, is published on digital dante. 2 these broad calculations are based on the concordance in moore 342-94 (discussed later in this essay), which are still the most complete lists of intertextual passages in dante’s works. 3 all quotations from the commedia refer to the text established by petrocchi. the english translations are by mandelbaum, which are also available on digital dante. 4 i reviewed all the commentaries included in the dartmouth dante project. 5 on this issue, see especially cioffi. 6 only from the twentieth century on, commentators seem more interested in providing longer and more detailed notes on intertextual passages. a notable earlier exception is the commentary by castelvetro (1570). 7 moore used the term “concordance” twice to describe fay’s work, the alphabetical list of all words used in the commedia with references to where they appear in the text (45, 130). 8 almost all of the “direct citations” are found in dante’s treatises, especially the convivio. moore lists only two direct citations in the commedia: inf. 25.97 and inf. 25.98 – the moment where dante tells ovid to be silent about cadmus and arethusa – correspond to met. 4.570-88 and to met 5.572ff. – the passages in the metamorphoses where ovid tells these stories (moore 349, 350, 363). moore’s category of “allusions and reminiscences” seems the perfect label for cases of doubt, where ovid’s text is but one of the sources featuring a certain classical character or motif. 9 in chronological order, the “dante’s ovid” essays are: szombathely; moore 206-28; palgen; settineri; paratore, “ovidio”; paratore, “ovidio e dante”; hawkins, “dante’s ovid”; sowell 115, hawkins, “the metamorphosis of dante”; picone, “l’ovidio di dante”; brugnoli; picone, “dante e i miti”; clay; brownlee, “ovid”; vazzana 123-47; ginsberg, “dante’s ovids: allegory”; wetherbee; ginsberg, “dante’s ovids.” 10 for all projects involving computational models, it is important to stress that this kind of research does not take the human out of literary studies, in the sense of neglecting “the significance of gender, race, class, religion, sexuality, and history” (as clement par. 1 has it), or in the sense that the role of the researcher would drastically diminish. as many articles on digital humanities research stress, the computer technology does not replace but rather supplements, modifies, redefines traditional research (see, for instance, cooney, roe, and olsen par. 39). researchers construct the computational models, determine which results are meaningful and valid, and so on. humanist studies & the digital age van peteghem 4.1 (2015) 56 11 on the history and relaunch of the digital dante website, see the note from the editor teodolinda barolini: http://digitaldante.columbia.edu/about-us/. 12 szombathely, moore 349-51, and vazzana 146-51 are examples of the first approach and follow the order of ovid’s texts, my own print concordance (“italian readers of ovid,” appendix) lists the passages in the order they appear in dante’s commedia. 13 for other instances where the word is used in latin literature, see “trabs” in lewis and short, which includes passages by vergil, statius, and valerius flaccus, among others. 14 see brownlee, “dante and the classical poets” 113, which inspired the inclusion of this category. 15 all quotations from ovid’s tristia refer to the oxford classical texts edition by owen, and the english translations are by green. some editions, for instance the loeb edition, have “dolor” instead of “pudor” at v. 30. while these are different sentiments, it should be pointed out that ovid (re)mentions the feeling of shame – “pudorem” – at the following v. 31. 16 all quotations from ovid’s metamorphoses refer to the oxford classical texts edition by tarrant, and the english translations are by raeburn. 17 in contrast to the other two minyades, the third sister leuconoë simply announces the topic of her story and starts narrating (met. 4.169-70). 18 this is not an intertextual passage commonly included in the concordances and commentaries. i have only seen it briefly mentioned in ferrero and chimenz 32, note 21. 19 the verb “abborrare” (i.e., working with “borra,” inferior pieces of wool, and therefore to err, wander) is an interesting choice that can be seen as another connection with the ovidian passage. as pointed out before, the minyades pass their time at home weaving and telling stories – two activities that have been traditionally used as each other’s proxies. to talk about the act of writing, dante used a verb that is linked with weaving as well. 20 all quotations from ovid’s fasti refer to the loeb edition by henderson and goold. http://digitaldante.columbia.edu/about-us/ humanist studies & the digital age van peteghem 4.1 (2015) 57 works cited alighieri, dante. la commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. ed. giorgio petrocchi. 4 vols. florence: le lettere, 1994. print. ---. the divine comedy of dante: inferno. trans. allen mandelbaum. new york: bantam, 1980. print. ---. the divine comedy of dante: purgatorio. trans. allen mandelbaum. new york: bantam, 1982. print. ---. epistole. ed. arsenio frugoni and giorgio brugnoli. opere minori. vol. iii, tome ii. epistole – egloge – questio de aqua et terra. ed. arsenio frugoni, giorgio brugnoli, enzo cecchini, and francesco mazzoni. 507-643. milan: ricciardi, 1996. print. antconc. computer software. laurence anthony. vers. 3.4.3. tokyo, japan: waseda university, 2014. web. 10 feb. 2015. <http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/>. author. diss. 2013. bamman, david, and gregory crane. “discovering multilingual text reuse in literary texts.” perseus digital library, 2009. web. 10 feb. 2015. <http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/publications/2009-bamman.pdf>. ---. “the logic and discovery of textual allusion.” proceedings of the 2008 lrec workshop on language technology for cultural heritage date (latech 2008). marrakech, morocco: lrec, 2008. web. 10 feb. 2015. <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dbamman/pubs/pdf/latech2008.pdf>. barolini, teodolinda. commento baroliniano. center for digital research and scholarship. new york: columbia university libraries, 2014. web. 10 feb. 2015. <http://digitaldante.columbia.edu/criticism-context/commento-baroliniano/>. ---. dante’s poets: textuality and truth in the ‘comedy.’ princeton: princeton up, 1984. print. brownlee, kevin. “dante and the classical poets.” the cambridge companion to dante. ed. rachel jacoff. cambridge: cambridge up, 1993. 100-19. print. ---. “ovid.” dante encyclopedia. ed. richard lansing, teodolinda barolini, et al. new york: garland, 2000. 666-68. print. brugnoli, giorgio. “forme ovidiane in dante.” aetatis ovidianae: lettori di ovidio dall’antichità al rinascimento. ed. italo gallo and luciano nicastri. napels: edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1995. 239-59. print. castelvetro, lodovico. sposizione di lodovico castelvetro a xxix canti dell’inferno dantesco, ora per la prima volta data in luce da giovanni franciosi. modena: società tipografica, 1886. web. 10 feb. 2015. <http://dante.dartmouth.edu>. cioffi, caron ann. “the anxieties of ovidian influence: theft in inferno xxiv and xxv.” dante studies 112 (1994): 77-100. print. clay, diskin. “the metamorphosis of ovid in dante’s commedia.” picone and crivelli 69-85. clement, tanya. “text analysis, data mining, and visualizations in literary scholarship.” literary studies in the digital age: an evolving anthology. ed. kenneth m. price and ray siemens. mla commons. modern language association of america, 2013. web. 10 feb. 2015. doi: 10.1632/lsda.2013.8 coffee, neil, et al. “intertextuality in the digital age.” transactions of the american philological association 142.2 (2012): 383-422. web. 10 feb. 2015. doi: 10.1353/apa.2012.0010 http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/ http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/publications/2009-bamman.pdf 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secolo decimo quinto con introduzione e note dell'avv{ocato} g. zac[c]heroni. marseille: mossy; florence: molini, 1838. web. 10 feb. 2015. <http://dante.dartmouth.edu>. digital dante. center for digital research and scholarship. new york: columbia university libraries, 2014. web. 10 feb. 2015. <http://digitaldante.columbia.edu>. etraces. natural language processing at the university of leipzig, göttingen centre for digital humanities, and the gesis – leibniz-institute for the social sciences, 2011-14. web. 10 feb. 2015. <http://etraces.e-humanities.net>. fay, edward allen. concordance of the divina commedia. cambridge: the dante society; boston: little, 1888. print. ferrero, giuseppe guido, and siro a. chimenz. il canto xxv dell’inferno. rome: signorelli, 1954. print. gelli, giovan battista. commento edito e inedito sopra la divina commedia. ed. carlo negroni. florence: bocca, 1887. web. 10 feb. 2015. <http://dante.dartmouth.edu>. ginsberg, warren. “dante’s ovids.” ovid in the middle ages. ed. james g. clark, frank t. coulson, and kathryn l. mckinley. cambridge: cambridge up, 2011. 143-59. print. ---. “dante’s ovids: allegory, irony, and the poet as translation.” chaucer’s italian tradition. ann arbor: u of michigan p, 2002. 29-57. print. guido da pisa. expositiones et glose super comediam dantis, or commentary on dante’s inferno. edited with notes and an introduction by vincenzo cioffari. albany: state u of new york p, 1974. web. 10 feb. 2015. <http://dante.dartmouth.edu>. hawkins, peter s. “dante’s ovid.” literature and belief 2 (1985): 1-12. print. ---. “the metamorphosis of ovid.” sowell 17–34. print. jacoff, rachel, and jeffrey t. schnapp, eds. the poetry of allusion: virgil and ovid in dante’s ‘commedia.’ stanford: stanford up, 1991. print. kleinhenz, christopher. “perspectives on intertextuality in dante’s divina commedia.” romance quarterly 54.3 (2007): 183-94. web. 10 feb. 2015. doi: 10.3200/rqtr.54.3.183-194 lewis, charlton t., and charles short. a latin dictionary. rev. ed. oxford: clarendon; new york: oxford up, 1984. print. moore, edward. studies in dante. first series: scripture and classical authors in dante. oxford: clarendon, 1896. print. ovid. fasti. ed. jeffrey henderson. trans. james g. frazer. rev. ed. g. p. goold. 2nd ed. 1989. reprint. cambridge: harvard up, 1996. print. ---. metamorphoses. trans. david raeburn. london: penguin, 2004. print. http://dantelab.dartmouth.edu/ http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://digitaldante.columbia.edu/ http://etraces.e-humanities.net/ http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ humanist studies & the digital age van peteghem 4.1 (2015) 59 ---. metamorphoses. ed. r. j. tarrant. oxford: oxford up, 2004. print. ---. ovid’s metamorphoses books 1-5. ed. william anderson. norman: u of oklahoma p, 1997. print. ---. the poems of exile. trans. with an introduction by peter green. berkeley: u of california p, 2005. print. ---. tristia. ex ponto. ed. jeffrey henderson. trans. arthur leslie wheeler. rev. ed. g. p. goold. 2nd ed. 1988. reprint. cambridge: harvard up, 2002. print. ---. tristium libri quinque; ex ponto libri quattuor; halieutica fragmenta. ed. s. g. owen. oxford: clarendon, 1915. print. palgen, rudolf. “dante e ovidio.” convivium 13 (1959): 277-87. print. paratore, ettore. “ovidio.” enciclopedia dantesca. ed. umberto bosco. vol 4. rome: istituto dell’enciclopedia italiana, 1970-78. 225-36. print. ---. “ovidio e dante.” nuovi saggi danteschi. rome: signorelli, 1973. 47-100. print. philologic. computer software. vers. 3.2. artfl project and digital library development center at the university of chicago, 2010. web. 10 feb. 2015. <https://sites.google.com/site/philologic3/home>. picone, michelangelo. “dante e i miti.” picone and crivelli 21-32. ---. “l’ovidio di dante.” dante e la “bella scola” della poesia: autorità e sfida poetica. ed. amilcare a. iannucci. ravenna: longo, 1993. 107-44. print. picone, michelangelo, and tatiana crivelli, eds. dante: mito e poesia: atti del secondo seminario dantesco internazionale (monte verità, ascona, 23-27 giugno 1997). florence: cesati, 1999. print. segal, charles p. “philomela’s web and the pleasures of the text: reader and violence in the metamorphoses of ovid.” modern critical theory and classical literature. ed. irene j. f. de jong and j. p. sullivan. leiden: brill, 1994. 257-79. print. settineri, mariapina. “influssi ovidiani nella ‘divina commedia.’” siculorum gymnasium 12 (1959): 31-70. print. sowell, madison u., ed. dante and ovid: essays in intertextuality. binghamton: medieval & renaissance texts & studies, 1991. print. szombathely, gioachino. dante e ovidio: studio. trieste: lloyd austro-ungarico, 1888. print. vazzana, steno. dante e “la bella scola.” rome: ateneo, 2002. print. venturi, luigi. le similitudini dantesche ordinate, illustrate e confrontate. 3rd ed. florence: sansoni, 1911. internet archive, n.d. web. 10 feb. 2015. <http://www.archive.org/details/lesimilitudinid01ventgoog>. wetherbee, winthrop. “ovid and vergil in purgatory.” the ancient flame: dante and the poets. notre dame: u of notre dame p, 2008. 117-58. print. https://sites.google.com/site/philologic3/home http://www.archive.org/details/lesimilitudinid01ventgoog humanist studies & the digital age, 5.1 (2017) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.7264/n3pc30sd worlds of meaning massimo lollini welcome to the fifth issue of humanist studies &the digital age entitled networks and projects: new platforms in digital humanities. the sections perspectives and interventions are devoted to the publication of a selection from the proceedings of a colloquium held at brown university in the spring of 2015. these first two sections are presented and introduced by massimo riva in his essay on scholarly networks and collaborative practices. the third section of this issue, projects, is presented by crystal hall in her introduction, italian studies and digital humanities: research outcomes. in the brief notes of my editorial, i reflect on the idea of “network” as conceptual framework and privileged space of knowledge engaging with pierre lévy’s work, and i anticipate the topic of the sixth issue of this journal that will be published in 2019. the media scholar and philosopher pierre lévy conceives the “network” (which he prefers to call “cyberspace”) not only as the material infrastructure of digital communications but also the immense information it holds as well as the human beings involved in it. the impulse behind this new “medium of communication” made possible by the global connection of computers is the search for the actual living unity of human knowledge despite human scattering in space and time. he sees the theological and philosophical origin of this conception in the aristotelian idea of active intellect that developed in medieval philosophy in the attempt to find vehicles of communication between the celestial worlds emanating from god and mortal humanity dispersed in time and space (cyberculture xvi; peters, interview with pierre lévy 263). lévy’s idea of collective intelligence emerges from this mystical background and finds operative applications in concrete intellectual communities that gather themselves through the technological support to “think together”. in this perspective, the network is not a physical space, as technology is not an entity in itself; rather, it is constituted by an interactive and community-based means of communication, becoming one fundamental element of what lévy calls “collective intelligence”. this is a very important idea if one wants to start conceiving the computer field in a philosophical direction beyond the pervasive technical and programming issues. what is the “collective intelligence”? first of all, “it is a universally distributed intelligence that is enhanced, coordinated, and mobilized in real time” (collective intelligence 16). lévy argues that cyber culture, “gives shape to a new form of the universal, the universal without totality”, not because it is everywhere in actuality (as per globalization) but because the idea of cyberspace implicates “by right” all human beings. lévy holds that the new universal is characterized by “immersion”, related to “universal access” and should be conceived as a right, a kind of moral imperative that does not totalize through meaning: it unites us through contact and general interaction. in other words, this technological universal is not simply the result of a technology producing messages but of the actual thinking together and interaction within cyber culture. the point is that we are all in the same communication “deluge” whereby the identity of meaning, “the question of semantic closure or totalization is no longer relevant” as it was for the static form of alphabetic writing (cyberculture 100). what matters in the community prefigured by the network is not the content related to traditional forms of reading and writing but the being together in itself as a form of “negative” community which comes close to those envisaged by jean-luc nancy’s disavowed community and roberto esposito’s communitas among others. the real-time interconnection and dynamism create a shared context, “the same immense living hypertext for the participants in a communication” regardless of the message: “any text can become the fragment that http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ humanist studies & the digital age lollini 5.1 (2017) 2 passes unnoticed through the moving hypertext that surrounds it, connects it to other texts, and serves as a mediator or medium for reciprocal, interactive, uninterrupted communication”. from this perspective, there are no more messages “out of context” to be reduced to the meaning strategies and logic of previous media of communication including books and the institutions that controlled them: these are now “an imperfect fringe, the partial and unequal appendixes of an open space of interconnection animated by nonhierarchical communication (…) set in motion by magmatic processes of collective intelligence” (cyberculture 99). along these lines, lévy underlines that any public text accessible through the internet is now a virtual component in an immense and ever-expanding hypertext to the point that “hyperdocuments that are accessible through a computer network are powerful instruments of a collective reading-writing process (becoming virtual 59) collective intelligence comes to life in a culture and a community but it cannot be reduced to the status of conventional culture: in an intelligent community, the specific objective is to permanently negotiate the order of things, language, the role of the individual, the identification and definition of objects, the reinterpretation of memory. nothing is fixed. yet, this does not result in a state of disorder or absolute relativism, for individual acts are coordinated and evaluated in real time, according to a large number of criteria that are themselves constantly reevaluated in context. (collective intelligence 17) the individual of the intelligent community moves from the cartesian cogito to the cogitamus without disappearing into a sort of indistinguishable magma. the intelligent community encourages a process of growth and distinction that leads to a renewal of singularities, a new mode of identification, open, dynamic and positive (ibid. 18). it is the opposite of artificial intelligence: it does not put the machine at the center, it is a way to grow a renewed human/cultural cognitive system by exploiting the increasing computing power. the networked intelligence triggers the creation of what lévy calls the “space knowledge” conceived as a form of “cartography, a conceptual toolbox, a portable guide to anthropological mutation rather than a history” (collective intelligence 19). in this perspective, even though it has always existed the “space knowledge”, properly speaking, is the last of the four anthropological spaces occupied by humanity, each of them with its own distinctive features. the first was the nomadic space of earth, conceived not as a planet or a biosphere, but as “a cosmos in which humanity communicates with animals, plants, landscapes, locales, and spirits” (ibid. 131). starting from the paleolithic it was characterized by a sense of identity established through totems, lineage, myth and rites. the second anthropological space was the “territorial space” that establishes a predatory and destructive relationship with the earth: “it dominates, confines, encloses, inscribes, and measure. it takes place during the neolithic and among other things it gives birth to territorial inscription, writing, history and the state as a privileged political form. the commodity space, was the third anthropological dimension inhabited by humans; it is related to the appearance of the alphabet in greece, which was contemporary with the emergence of money. the commodity space gradually became a new world built from the unprecedented circulation and interaction of money, banking, capital, technology and extended markets. the industrial revolution was a key moment in this process whereby identity started to be related to the position within the domains of production and consumption in an economy of material and statistical goods centered around the capital. the growth of reading, printing as industry of mass production and later of electronic mass media, created the condition for public opinion and modern democracies (ibid. 58). lévy underlines here an important point that he applies to the fourth space and previous spaces as well: “when the commodity space assumes its autonomy within the territory, it doesn’t simply abolish the preceding spaces but subordinate them, organizes them in terms of its own objectives” (ibid. 137). the fourth space is the cyberspace, the networked space that we already introduced at the beginning of these brief notes. this new form of space is coming alive as an autonomous space and not yet fully developed as such; it will not erase the previous three anthropological spaces as they are irreversible and to some extent humanist studies & the digital age lollini 5.1 (2017) 3 “eternal”. in this sense, they should not be conceived as successive eras or epochs because they cannot be substituted for one another but coexist (collective intelligence 225). lévy holds that the four anthropological spaces depend on each other; he argues in favor of a form of human ecology conceived as the art of establishing harmonious relations among them (ibid. 230). since no semiotic operates without precedents, “the earth (here, the consubstantiality of signs, beings and things) is and remains the soil of meaning” (232). in this perspective, any form of media makes sense only because the public is able to integrate them in its cosmos and because they awaken the “terrestrial being in us” (ibid. 233). however, the anthropological spaces are related to one another only in terms of “causality without contact”: each of them encloses the previous space and imposes its direction and signification. the anthropological spaces are not a succession of layers, a system of infrastructures or a hierarchy of conditions. lower and upper spaces reciprocally nourish themselves and, in the end, the knowledge space, the space of imagination and creation nourishes all of them like the divine effusion in medieval cosmology was flowing from intelligence to intelligence until it reached the sublunary world (ibid. 236). nonetheless, the space knowledge does not point to some ideal of static perfection but to “the principle of self-organization, the continuous self-inventions of human communities and their worlds” (ibid. 239). in this perspective, one understands why this last anthropological space in which we live is not simply a way out of the earth space, territorial space or commodity space but a “bridge” between them establishing an essential continuity: the collective space of knowledge finds its unity in thought and is suspended in the void, it is “the centermost void that drives the entire universe” (ibid. 242-244). the ideal figure or metaphor of the fourth space is what lévy calls “cosmopedia”, the new organization of knowledge in the cyber space (collective intelligence 216). the sum of knowledge in the cyber space is now organized by the cosmos that cannot be reduced to static images such as the circle, the text or even the ipertext network. the cosmopedia is a dynamic and interactive multidimensional space. instead of the conjunction of image and text, characteristic of the encyclopedia, the cosmopedia combines a large number of different types of expression: static images, video, sound, interactive simulation, interactive maps, expert systems, dynamic ideographs, virtual reality, artificial life, etc. at its extreme the cosmopedia contains as many semiotics and types of representation as exist in the world itself. (216) the cosmopedia explores mutant semiotics and multiplies non-discursive utterances showing how discourse alone is insufficient for the investigation of meaning. it dissolves the differences between discrete and hierarchical disciplines and materializes in a dynamic topology, in an “immense multidimensional electronic image, perpetually metamorphosing”. however, moving beyond the metaphor and considering a technical point of view, lévy argues that collective intellects are effectively capable of constructing their own cosmopedia and that the space of knowledge represents an immanence of meaning and a return of the real within what remains a virtual reality (ibid. 216-217). following deleuze, lévy holds that the virtual possesses complete reality, in its virtuality: it is a new mode of reality emerging from change when one moves away from the discursive plane of actuality and embraces the enunciation process of the event. as he writes, “the virtual, strictly defined, has little relationship to that which is false, illusory, or imaginary. the virtual is by no means the opposite of the real”. lévy definition of virtual as opposed to what is actual is central to understand the new condition of meaning within intelligent communities and their cosmopedia: “it is a fecund and powerful mode of being that expands the process of creation, opens up the future, injects a core of meaning beneath the platitude of immediate physical presence” (becoming virtual, 16). lévy argues that media communication, from telephone to electronic mail, from radio to television and cinema establish a continuity in space and time that is far removed from the “living thought” possible in what he calls the space of knowledge (collective intelligence 108). he is convinced that the mass media are of little use in helping people think as a group and collectively develops solutions to their problems (ibid. 59). for him while the cyberspace triggers a redefinition of perception and interactive relation to space, the television and humanist studies & the digital age lollini 5.1 (2017) 4 other media simply lead to forms of unreality detached from perception. in other words, lévy thinks in postmedia terms and encourages a reflection in this area as well. lévy’s theory should continue being part of the most important debates in digital humanities. as alan liu writes, digital humanist should for sure continue creating digital archives and resources but at the same time they should enter into broader dialogue with the adjacent fields of computer and media theory, new media studies and media archaeology. from that dialogue standard issues in the digital humanities could be enlarged with philosophical and sociocultural meaning producing positive ripple effects on research and projects implementation (501). in closing these brief notes, i follow his suggestion and anticipate that the 2019 issue of humanist studies &the digital age will address precisely these crucial questions that intersects media theory and social media. works cited esposito, roberto. communitas: the origin and destiny of community. stanford, calif: stanford university press, 2010. print. lévy, pierre. cyberculture. minneapolis: u of minnesota, 2001. print. electronic mediations ; v. 4. ---. becoming virtual : reality in the digital age. new york: plenum trade, 1998. print. ---. lévy, pierre. collective intelligence: mankind's emerging world in cyberspace. new york: plenum trade, 1997. print. liu, alan. “where is cultural criticism in the digital humanities?” debates in the digital humanities, ed. matthew k. gold. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2012. 490-510. nancy, jean-luc, and philip armstrong. the disavowed community. 2017. internet resource. peters, michael a. “interview with pierre a. lévy, french philosopher of collective intelligence.” open review of educational research 2.1 (2015): 259-66. web. humanist studies & the digital age, 6.1 (2019) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.6.1.2 5 collective intelligence, the future of internet and the ieml interview to pierre lévy by art farley and massimo lollini part i: collective intelligence massimo lollini (ml): welcome to our interview, we are very glad to meet you. my name is massimo lollini and my colleague is art farley. the readers of humanist studies and the digital age are already familiar with the idea of collective intelligence, but today we would like to start by going deeper into this notion and its development in the context of the evolution of the internet and the digital humanities. what is the importance of collective intelligence for your work, and in relation to the history of humanities computing? pierre lévy (pl): big question, i think that the notion or even the expression “collective intelligence” has been coined by ethologists studying the social animals, and they have shown that social animals manifest a behavior implying collective intelligence, like the anthills, the beehives, and even the termites, but also the schools of fish, the flights of birds, the social mammals, and of course the primates. so, this notion predates humanity, but of course there is a new level of collective intelligence with humankind because of language, symbolic thinking, the ability to transmit a lot of knowledge from generation to generation and the building of complex social institutions that do not exist in the animal kingdom. so, human collective intelligence, i would say, is stronger than animal collective intelligence, and it's a new layer, the symbolic layer or the cultural layer. and for me, there is an evolution of human collective intelligence that is related to the communication media. i think that there was a new kind of collective intelligence after we invented writing systems, because it allowed the accumulation of knowledge, new kinds of memory, and then with the invention of the printing press and then with the electric or electronic media. so, anything that augments the power of language augments human collective intelligence. i think that with the internet, we reach a new point, a new threshold in the history of collective intelligence. because we have a medium with the almost complete disappearance of the constraints of a physical space, and the memory is accessible from any point on earth, a full kind of ubiquitous memory. also, everybody has the ability, at least theoretically, to add http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 6 something to the common memory. there is a communication from many to many, and there is also not only a connection of people but also of all the documents. there is more or less a unique, big mass of that, more or less accessible to everybody. for me, it is as if there is a kind of stigmergic communication. this is a communication by the intermediary of a common shared environment. i can say that almost the entire humanity, if not today but in a few years, will be able to add to this common memory and to read data on this common memory; and the communication between the people is made through the shared common memory. so, every time we like something, every time we share or we retweet, every time we buy something online, and so on ... in fact any kind of engagement will transform the relationship between data, not only for us but also for the others. so, and this is not only a quantitative modification, but we have also the ability to tag or to categorize data in our own way and so on. so, this is really a transformation of the common memory that is made by everybody at the same time. here we have a dialectic of the individual and the collective and also a dialectic, at the same time, of the collective and the common memory. so, this is the stigmergic communication as a new kind of collective intelligence. and i would say that, of course, it is for the moment very opaque and imperfect. there are a lot of problems, but we should go in the direction of making this collective intelligence reflexive to help people to understand what they are doing together. what is the role for the individual or for the small group in the transformation of collective memory? there will be systems to give back to the people an image of their cognitive operations and so on. this is what i call the perspective of a reflexive collective intelligence. ml: in a previous interview a few years ago, you held that the impulse behind collective intelligence is the search for the actual living unity of human knowledge despite human scattering in space and time. in some of your work you see the far origin of this impulse in medieval philosophy and theology, in the attempt to find vehicles of communication between the celestial worlds emanating from god and mortal humanity dispersed in time and space. what does your idea have in common with medieval philosophy and mysticism and how does it differ from them? how would you characterize your idea? in terms of theological mysticism or of philosophical utopianism? or would you rather prefer to see it simply as a form evolution or technological revolution without any particular ideological connotation? pl: it's a very big question. well, the idea, of a world of ideas that is common to the whole of humanity is already there in plato's work, or even in humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 7 aristotle's work, in this idea of the divine that is the thought thinking itself. and this is, for example, in the philosophy of aristotle and even more in its neoplatonic interpretation, the whole world is moved by the process of selfthinking of the divinity that is a kind of motor or engine for the movements of the whole universe. so, this is an idea of a big intellect that is at the center, or at the top of the universe. it's a very old idea and related to philosophy in general. it's not a particular trend, of course, it has been a little bit forgotten in modern philosophy, but the old trend of philosophy was organized around this. and what is interesting for me is that in the middle ages some philosophers tried to reconcile the ideas of plato and aristotle with the ideas brought by the monotheistic revelation, like for the jews, the christians, and for the muslims. and they said basically that there was this big infinite, absolute intellect in the sky, in heaven, but not a physical heaven, of course, it's a cosmological, philosophical heaven. and there are some people that are more oriented to the divine intellect than others. and these people, the prophets, are more or less playing the role of an interface between the divine intellect, and the limited, finite, and imperfect intellects of the human beings. the whole process is a top-down process with the intermediary of the prophets and the revelation. and i think that we can use this abstract model of the relationship between an absolute intellect, or in an idea of intellect, that belongs to the whole of humanity and the individual people who are mortal, finite and imperfect. so, instead of having a top-down model, we can imagine a bottom-up model where the real living and mortal people are thinking together, adding to the common knowledge and participating in the construction of the global intellect. so, our idea of collective intelligence is not any more a universal intelligence emanating toward the human beings, but just the opposite, the human beings contributing to the construction of a common intellect and of course benefiting from it. art farley (af): this collective intelligence sounds like science to me. but it tries to do it from a bottom-up perspective. what can we observe? what can we see? can we develop a global understanding of reality from our observations? pl: you are totally right. and i agree with you. so, i would like to make a comparison or a metaphor, if you want. if you think about the situation at the time of ancient egypt, at the time of the pharaohs where one or two percent of the population were able to read and write; they were the scribes. they were working for the big palaces or for the temples. they were the public servants and the priests and the rest of the population were farmers and they did not know how to write. if you had said to these scribes that several centuries after their death and after the end of their civilization, humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 8 there will be new civilizations where eighty percent of the population would be able to read and write, they would be very surprised. they would not believe you. for them, reading and writing was a privilege of a very small minority. so, if we take this example and we say, okay, today the scientific community is a small part of the human population, and it is a kind of intellectual elite. but maybe in one or two centuries, the majority, the great majority of human population will function the way the scientific community is working today. with better instruments, not in printed scientific journals, but in a big collective memory online which you can access very easily. you can have knowledge on demand with very easy-touse interfaces and so on and not only get the knowledge but also add to it. the whole human population could function exactly as the scientific community or at least an ideal version of the scientific community, because we know that it's not perfect. ml: so your idea of collective intelligence is not hierarchical, so to speak, it doesn't come from a top-down impulse but from a bottom-up one; so, it is basically a reversal of the great chain of being, the idea that everything emanates from the ens perfectissimum. on the other hand, i think that the inspiration in your work is not only scientific but also ethical. you refer quite often to the idea of good as being something that the human collective intelligence is looking for and projected toward. how can the collective intelligence, conceived as a modern technological and scientific revolution, attain that ethical dimension that you have in mind quite often in your work? pl: well, i think that the ethical dimension is also something that is there from the beginning in philosophy in general, you know, the idea of good in plato's work is like the sun in the world of ideas. so, aiming at the good, i think, is what every philosopher is doing and also what we should all try to do, at least in a certain part of our activity. but for the particular case of collective intelligence, i think that there is a kind of symbiosis or a circular causality between human collective intelligence and human development. by human development, i mean education and a good environment. i have a model of human development that has an actual part and a virtual part. in the actual part, you have everything that allows physically a communication and memory, the media, the messages, the libraries, today the web, and so on. everything that allows us to communicate. then we have all the material, the health of the human bodies, the health of the environment, all the physical and technical equipment. and there is also the social dimension, the people, individuals, their relationship, the trust, the harmony of the social roles. so finally, all the signs, all the beings and all the things at the actual level and at the virtual level, you have knowledge, accumulation and continuous renewal of knowledge, all kinds humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 9 of knowledge, not only scientific or academic knowledge, but everything that helps us to live. you have the values, the rights, the obligations the governance, everything that is related to ethics, law and so on. and finally, all the know-how competences, the economic resources, all these things that encompass the power, what we are able to do. so, if you relate all these dimensions of human reality, and if you understand that all of these dimensions are interconnected, you have a kind of general model of human development. and this manifests itself, for example, in the life expectancy in public health, the degree of education, in the economic prosperity and so on. so, all of this is human development, and i think that this human development is very closely related to our degree of collective intelligence. it works as an engine; collective intelligence is the engine of human development, and human development is the basis of collective intelligence. that's the general perspective. ml: in one of your earlier articles and more recently in your book world philosophy you write that the “cosmos thinks in us”. what do you exactly mean by that and how is a collective intelligence relating to a cosmological idea? pl: this is a very complex issue that would take one or two semesters to develop. first, we have to understand that for each different culture there is a different image of nature or the cosmos. the cosmos in which we live today in the twenty-first century in western societies and so on, is very different from the cosmos in which our ancestors lived. they had a completely different representation. the way in which we perceive the world around us is a very important part of our identity, of the way we think. we think with this world, with our society, with our tools, with our institutions, but also with the nature around us, or at least the way we imagine that this nature works. okay? we think with our brain, of course, but we think also with our language, with our techniques, with our world view and so on. so, this intermingling between the internal part of the subject and the external part of the subject –of the subject that i'm trying to illustrate– it's like a möbius ring. there is a continuous transformation from the inside into the outside and the outside into the inside. ml: we have another question that was triggered by the reading of world philosophy where you write that the planetary movement toward the universal interconnection finds its roots directly in the race to power: economic, commercial, scientific, technical, cultural, and political power. contrary to what is happening today with the emergence of the ideology of sovereignism everywhere, you argue that the more a political regime, a culture, an economic form or an organizational style has interconnections the better it will survive and succeed in contemporary environment. for you, the best way to maintain and develop a community no longer consists humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 10 in raising, preserving or extending frontiers within a territory but to improve the quality of relationships in its own reality as well as with other collectives. you see this process as facilitated by the emergence of internet and virtual communities that have substituted for the city as a physical space. it looks that the target that you set for humanity is to learn to go beyond conflicts and differences that distract from its fundamental unity. what is this deeper reality that humans need to learn to appreciate? and how would this process be possible? a look of contemporary world political situation seems to clearly contradict your perspective. sovereignism, wars, including cyberwars, seem to prevail ... and china is developing its own internet… pl: there is a lot of information and questions in what you just said. first, i would like to say that historical evolution is not necessarily led by good intentions or by a particular deliberate plan. it's more an emergence from a lot of local actions, and people don't realize what will be the effect of all their actions. no, it's an emergence. and very often you have very dirty things like sex, money, fights for power and all these things that we don't like, but they exist very strongly. they are more or less leading the world; actions that are led by all these things that we don't like very much, can have an effect that is unexpected and that is not so bad, for example. it's not an example, it's a basic fact. there were 1 billion people at the end of the 19th century and there is more than 7 billion people today. the life expectancy in the same period of time has augmented for the whole population of the planet by 20 years. at the end of the 19th century, there was 15 percent of the population that was literate. today, more than 80 percent. and i could go on and on, for example, it is true that the inequalities between people are augmenting, but for me, what is much more important is that extreme poverty has sharply decreased in the last century; all of these new realities were led by these horrible things like a lust for money and power. of course, there were also good intentions, and people working to teach other people or to help them in the medical sector. and there were also good political leaders and so on. but there were also bad people. what i am looking at is the general evolution. and of course, if we read the news, we say, oh, it's worse and worse, and the worst president, a horrible situation, people hating themselves. but if you look back at the time of hitler and mussolini, we realize that it is always horrible. but we have to take a step back and look at the general trends and do what we can to improve the situation. i am confident that despite all the conflicts the world has improved, and i don't think by the way that conflicts will ever disappear and maybe it's a good thing that there are conflicts, but of course we could try to solve these conflicts by symbolic means instead of shedding blood. of course, this would be a possible evolution. i don't think humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 11 that we will reach a situation where there will be no conflict, but the way to solve the conflict will probably evolve. and, by the way, despite all the wars of the 20th century and despite all the horrible violence that there is today, if you look at the numbers there is less violence today than there was in the previous century. so, we should not look only at the titles of the news, if we look at the big numbers, we will have a different picture. okay, the chinese have their own internet. the same is true for the russians and the iranians. but it is still more or less the same computers. it is still the urls; it is still http, and so on. there are a lot of chinese students in the us, lots of american investments in china and so on. it is not so divided. ml: so, you are saying that the wars and conflicts that surround us are bad, but if we look at the big numbers and the big trends, we will see a sort of movement toward improvement or an improving situation that will not erase all the problems but still will allow us to reach a better position. pl: also, i think that the trend toward a kind of unification by communication but also by the movement of population, exchange of students, tourism, all the things that connect people. if you look at the number of people that are traveling, for example, not just communication by electrons but bodily transportation, there is effectively a movement toward a unification of the planet. af: i'm just thinking about embedding all of this discussion about intellectual development and knowledge into the reality of climate change and the human impact on the environment. as you just mentioned, many people are traveling. do you think every time you get on that plane what's happening to the environment? you know, when you get on the plane, you can ignore it; we go along, and i drive downtown. at some point we're going to have to get on the ball and change the way we're doing things. so how do you see collective intelligence interacting with changes to the physical planet that will be coming? pl: okay, i am looking at a particular trend that is the extraordinary developments of sensors everywhere on the planet, not only for the temperature and atmospheric pressure and so on, but also everything that helps us to observe the evolution of the ecosystems; also, all the sensors that are now, in our cities, the very representation in the virtual, into digital form of the physical world. so, we have more or less a kind of model of the planet inside of the digital world. it's not complete, but we can see that it's slowly, slowly happening. so, if we could have a representation of the effects, i mean in real time, of the effects of the human actions on our physical environments and back, the effects of the transformation of the environment on the human population. and if people were immersed not humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 12 only in the physical world, but also in this model that shows them the effects of what they do collectively, they could do things in another way. i think that this perspective of human collective intelligence should be coupled, or put in the loop, with a model of our planetary environment. that's the direction toward which we are heading. ml: i have a question about how you relate the notion of collective intelligence to the new media. i would like you to explain the differences that you see between the use of internet and collective intelligence and the use of traditional and social media in today's culture. is it possible to differentiate these two realities that are, after all, connected? pl: i'm not sure that i'm able to respond to your question, but i can give a personal experience. i asked my students to take notes in class, not on paper or not even on a word document that will stay in the hard disk of their computers, but to take their notes on twitter with the hashtag of the class. so, in this way they can share their notes; their notes become searchable. they can compare the different points of views that they have or different understandings of the same discourse, that is the discourse of the professor; or when they have something to read, they have to tweet a kind of summary of what they have read with the link, and they can see, ah, these students have a different summary from mine. and they can discuss also when they have questions; not only the professor, but other students can respond to the questions. and finally, another very big advantage of this method is that i can check if they have understood the right thing. when you have 200 students in front of you, you cannot possibly check if they have understood, but if you can read the notes, you see immediately what are the misunderstandings. so, this is an example of a use of social media by contrast to the old media and of the practice of collective intelligence at a small scale. in the 1990s, you know, i said that collective intelligence was a fractal concept. i was meaning by this that it is something that is true at different scales. but today i would say that it is a scalable concept, so you can begin small and then you can apply the same principle at a bigger scale. so, for me this is an example of good use of the social media. i would take another, little example in my experience. i'm on twitter, and what i'm doing is making a kind of collection of experts on different subjects. for example, in geopolitics, i have a list of experts on turkey, a list of experts on iran, the list experts on egypt, a list of experts on israel and so on, because i'm very interested in the middle east. also, i have a list of experts in artificial intelligence, experts in blockchain and all these new technologies, crypto technology and so on, and i have more or less 30 lists. humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 13 when i have questions about what is happening in this field or what's happening in this region of the globe, i go to my list and i read what the experts have to say. they can have diverging advice, but i can make my own opinion. i would not be able to do this thing with the old media, with television and newspaper. it would be absolutely impossible. so, i can set up my own intelligence agency, if i use correctly the social media and i would not have been able to do this in the 20th century, for example. of course, you need training to be able to do this, it takes time. but there is a big reward. ml: okay. so, you have a positive view of the interaction between media, new media, the internet, and collective intelligence. of course, what we read every day is not so positive. pl: i read the same things, you know. i'm not going to repeat what all the newspaper are saying because you already know it. af: the students want to know if the media and the internet are creating for us a post-truth world. i just want to add a little bit to that. as you said, for your class, the way you're using twitter, you can watch what the students do and then, in a certain sense as god, you come in and say, “oh, this is really the correct interpretation of what i've said”; this is as opposed to the way that most people use the internet, which is, “oh, here's three people that think like i do. i think that's really how it is.” and then soon you have five groups, different groups of students, all coalescing around their different interpretations, with no god to tell them what's true. pl: okay, yes. i might seem more or less like god. but every student is able also to read what all the students have said, and they are also able to ask questions or give different responses, and so on. i'm not in a unique position. my position comes from the fact that i am the professor and that i know better than them and also take the time to do this work; but they have the same possibility, and i try to teach by example, by what i am doing, like making lists of experts and so on. i'm trying to teach them to do the same. as for the question of post-truth, you know, i really don't agree with this, because if you think about the 1920s of the 20th century when there was a state radio that was streaming propaganda in the streets, with only the voice of the dictator. that was one thing. this was real control of the mind, and there was no free press and so on. today, of course people are lying, but let me tell you that there are lies from the beginning of language. you can speak, you can lie, but the fact is when you have different voices, it's easier for you to be able to discover what is the truth from your point of view. so, truth is not something that is already there in the world, it emerges from discussion. people say, ah, there is this fact, but the other people say there is another fact, and some other people another fact; some humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 14 other people are trying to distract the attention, and they are lying. but truth can only emerge from a conversation, and only for people who practice critical thinking. if we go back to the scientific community, if everybody has the same theory, there is no scientific discussion anymore. what i say to my students is, you know, no theory is true. the theory is always hypothetical. at the beginning, they are shocked. no, maybe a fact can be true. but when you begin to try to explain the facts, develop a causal system, you tell a story that is already a hypothesis. okay? so, the situation where television tells the truth, and we are happy because we know the truth and it is a reality and everybody agrees. this is the real totalitarianism. ml: collective intelligence produces a form of deterritorialization, but at the same time i see a counter movement because the use of collective intelligence tends to be localized, tends to identify some areas of the world to requalify through the collective intelligence tool. so how can these two tendencies combine with each other: the one toward deterritorialization and the other toward localization and requalification of a territory through the collective intelligence? pl: there is no contradiction between the two trends, it's more a paradox than a real contradiction. i can give you again a very simple personal example. i live in a small village in a rural area and we have a facebook group of the village, and every time that someone has lost his cat or has a small problem in a particular home and so on, we communicate immediately in the village. so, we know each other and we help each other, thanks to this very simple facebook group. of course, facebook is a huge network with 2 billion users, but we have a very local facebook group and it works. at a bigger scale, there is this trend of the smart cities or smart territories where the equipment of the cities and the transportation and the quality of the atmosphere and all the factors that affects the life of the inhabitants are registered, computed and sometimes given back to the inhabitants. there are all these aspects of every territorial or local collective intelligence. on the other side, these cities are nodes in global networks of communication, business, science, and so on. so, there is no contradiction between making these local nodes stronger and making the whole network global network stronger. ml: at the beginning of our interview, you spoke about how a collective intelligence brings about new forms of memory. how is that possible to preserve the memory of what you are doing with your local community and the wider world community? how is the memory of internet collective intelligence working? humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 15 pl: i think the first thing to preserve is the memory of the past centuries, everything that is in the museums and the libraries; recently, there has been a huge museum that burned in brazil and probably only a very small part of it has been digitized. so, the whole memory is lost and this is a terrible tragedy. first, we have to preserve the heritage and then maybe we have to realize that we are not going to record everything. it's almost impossible to record everything, but we will have to do some selection to filter this and to try to decide what will be the data set that we will preserve for future analysis, understanding and so on. this is a huge political and epistemological problem that cannot be solved in general. we have to see it every case. af: how do we filter out what has happened? there's a big difference between intelligence and knowledge. you know, everything we do, i can say stupid things, but that reflects intelligence, because i'm an intelligent being. i could even put together that stupid idea and broadcast it to people, so there will be many, many stupid ideas getting put into it daily, as well as the knowledge that is getting put into this collective intelligence. how will we ever be able to pull that apart? i'm not quite sure what the tools will be. as you indicated, it could be political as well as other dimensions that will pull that apart. pl: i would say that there are special communities or subcommunities particularly in charge of knowledge. in universities and in big companies, there are people in charge of knowledge management to record what has been proven by the experience and so on. so, i think that's the main difference. the knowledge has been filtered through experience, reflection, testing and so on and then preserved and we say, okay, this is knowledge, this is precious and that's it, but maybe we are wrong and will improve this and will replace bad knowledge with better knowledge. there is no perfect response. you know, it's a constant quest, the quest for knowledge. af: we have upped the scale of the size of that filtering that needs to be done with the internet and all its connections. as you said, everyone can contribute, everyone can contribute daily to what is there. to find a way to filter that and to find the knowledge that is in collective intelligence will be one of the biggest challenges, i think, for the future. pl: a lot of all these contributions will be just ignored and some other contributions will be acknowledged, shared, implemented, and tested. it's the real process that is messy. but there is no other way to find what is knowledge and what is not, but we have to imagine new ways to do this at this scale of the internet. that's the real challenge. af: i agree. humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 16 part ii: the future of internet and the ieml ml: last time we spoke a lot about collective intelligence. today, the focus is going to be on your most recent work, especially ieml. but before going there, we would like to have a little transition. the question we have is related to the fact that you formulated your idea of collective intelligence and cyber space more or less 20 years ago. is there anything new in digital humanities that makes you change the way you present collective intelligence or the very notion of collective intelligence in cyberspace? more specifically, we are curious to see if you think that these big ideas of collective intelligence and cyberspace have been incarnated or not in the worldwide web as it is right now. so, two questions: is there anything new in digital humanities computing that makes you adjust your vision of collective intelligence or cyberspace? second question: is the worldwide web right now an incarnation or a possible location of collective intelligence and of cyberspace as you conceive them? pl: collective intelligence, the book in french, i wrote before the existence of the worldwide web. in fact, it was just the internet at the time. it's a philosophical vision of the future, a philosophical vision of what could be a global civilization based on the digital and the general interconnection of all the computers, and all the phones and so on. those platforms did not exist at the time, but we can agree that the smartphone is a computer put in your pocket. so, i don't have anything to remove from this vision. the vision is still there, the question is how far are we from this vision? we have of course a long way to go, and maybe we will never arrive. my goal was to indicate a direction of evolution. it was not the prediction that this will happen. so, i'm going to answer your question in the vision of tim berners-lee, the creator of the web. the worldwide web for him, even if he didn't use the exact expression at the time, the worldwide web was a tool for collective intelligence. even at the time, more particularly for the scientific community that he was working with (physicists), there was this notion of a tool for collective intelligence from the beginning. but once you have a tool it's one thing; it's another thing to use it in the best possible way. for me, when i spoke about collective intelligence, it was to answer the question: what is the best thing we can do with the internet? it is collective intelligence. if there is the internet, there is the possibility of a fantastic era of collective intelligence on earth. okay, it's the best thing we can do. so, at the time, the movement of the open source software maybe existed, but it was not well known. it was very underground. and today, i think that the majority of the software on the planet is open source. this, for me, is a very good example of collective intelligence, in action. if you look at some things so popular as github, for example, to stay in the same sector, everybody can look at the code of other programmers. you can copy; you can make comments; you can improve. so, this is for me a very good example. humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 17 a second very good example is wikipedia. there everybody can be a contributor, and there are a lot of editors and a lot of people who are able to learn something from this fantastic online encyclopedia. these are two very small examples, but you can have a lot of particular communities that are able to organize themselves thanks to the internet. now of course there is publicity and propaganda, manipulation, bots, and trolls, but you cannot assume that, because we have a fantastic tool of memory, reasoning, computing and coordination, miraculously human nature will change and people will stop lying or committing crimes or fighting with each other. these are two different things. so, i think the web is a good, a very good, tool for collective intelligence, but you know, tim berners lee himself saw recently that the web has been confiscated by the big platforms, the famous, google, facebook, amazon, and so on. and he thinks that we should do something else. i have read this proposition that is very interesting. so, basically, he's proposing that we, the users, have a better control on our own data. this is an idea that a lot of people have currently, that there is something like a sovereignty of the individual over its own data that should be added, because they are human rights or something like this. today, more than 60 percent of the human population is connected to the internet, very soon it will be 90 percent, and all the political discussions, all the information, and all the educational resources and everything are organized by the internet and is disseminated like data. and, basically, all the symbols that are used to make a living society are today digitized. i think that this idea of the sovereignty of the individual is something that is very important. and i think the next step will incorporate this principle. so, this is one thing; another thing is precisely my proposition. we have today a kind of universal addressing system for the computers, all the servers. this is tcp ip, the internet. we have a universal addressing system for the data that is independent from the computers. it's the level of the web, the url if you want. and i think that it's not enough. we should have a universal addressing system for the concepts or the ideas or the categories because today the web is fragmented by the different natural languages, the different disciplines, the different classification systems and so on. and here i am not speaking about the file formats. okay. we need standards for everything. i am speaking about the concepts themselves. i'm speaking about language. i'm speaking about semantics. so, in the current state of semantic division, i think there's a need for a new layer of universal addressing system. it is very useful to augment and make it reflective, because if we don't have reflexivity, the process of collective intelligence will not be as useful as we would expect or as we would like it to be. so, we need critical thinking; we need reflexivity; we need open dialogue; we need open access to the desktop, all these things. my program is to open collective intelligence and the knowledge commons, the data that could be useful for science, for education, for public health, for the preservation of our ecosystems and so on. first, enlarging and augmenting the commands, and, second, i think that it is very important that our processes, like the model, the algorithms, and older tools that we use to process the data, should be as transparent and open as possible. without humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 18 this transparency, to have a scientifically based, collective intelligence is impossible. one of the things that is notoriously difficult to explicitly make transparent is meaning. so that's why i invented this language, as a means to make meaning transparent, actually more transparent than the natural languages. what does this transparency mean? it means that it should be as computable as possible. so, i spent more than 20 years inventing this language. it was very, very difficult. and in doing it, i understood why other people, were not doing it because it's almost impossible. so, what i have now is a language like any natural language, like french, english, mandarin, arabic and so on, that allows you to express any idea you want and its opposite because, of course, because it is a language, you have a possibility of negation, of interrogation and so on. we can say everything, and you can say all the differences and nuances in meaning as what you want, as long as you respect the grammar. this is one thing. and the other thing is that this language is also a regular language, in the sense of chomsky, because of a very rigorous syntax and, above all, there is a complete parallelism between the semantics and the syntax in this language, which is of course not at all the case with ordinary natural languages. if you can combine these two aspects, the fact that you can express any kind of meaning or concept, and the fact that the semantics is computable, you have a good intermediary, a good interface between human beings and computers, not only between computers, but also between networks of computers and data centers and so on. and, on the other hand, you have a good pivot language between the natural languages. let's say you translate one particular text in natural language into ieml, and, once it is translated, you can very easily translate it into all the other natural languages. with ieml, every word, every phrase, every text is like a particular point in a symmetrical coordinate system. and, it is inherent to the language that any point, any expression of the language, is automatically in connection with the other points. and so, you know, what are the most resembling points around the point, you know, the semantic relationship between the different points of this semantic space and so on. it's like a geographic coordinate system, and it's very symmetric at the mathematical level. it's a very symmetric coordinate system. so, all the computations can be done automatically so it will improve search, and improve automatic translation, and i have designed it to be one level of universal addressing above the web, an addressing of concepts. so, we will be able to coordinate better our collective intelligence and to make it reflexive. it will be like a mirror on which we will be able to see what's going on in terms of cognitive processes, what are people speaking about, what the data is about and so on, not just quantitative, but qualitative. and, of course, if the qualitative is clear, the quantitative would be better. af: interesting. clearly within ai, people have tried to do translations and automatic translation. there were all the approaches of going from word to word, and then getting funny things happening. that's how people, at a raw level, will try to do the translation. the idea in ai was to develop some core language into which you would humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 19 translate, say spanish, into this universal representation of meaning; then we would translate that back to another language. so these are similar ideas; these were never easy algorithms and processes to write? you said, well it will be easy to go from ieml to this language into that language. to me, those are major research projects to figure out how to do that. it's not an easy thing to do. easy is a flexible term; i understand. we see that you're doing some important work. i mean you have a team of people doing some work. are there people who are actually working on translating english into the ieml or other things? because that seems to me to be the challenge; to be able to get from language into a point in your semantic space is a nice idea, but how do we move around there and move back into our language or another? pl: it is relatively easier to go from ieml to a natural language than from a natural language to ieml, because in ieml, the meaning is already formalized. instead, in a text in a natural language, the meaning is not formalized, so you have to disambiguate and so on. so, when i say easy, i mean it's easier to go from ieml to natural language than the opposite way. that problem, natural language to ieml is difficult; i know because we tried. af: that was my point. pl: so, not to say that it is a piece of cake. of course, it's a huge research program and everything about ieml is a research program. i have the dictionary, and i have the syntax of the language. this, and all the applications, is a huge research program. af: you have the formalism. you have it formalized. you know, those are the big issues; getting in and out, having a tool that someone can use to interact with ieml. you seem to hint that there could be an input tool into the language and things like that. this leads me to a bigger question. it is about the relationship of humans to collective intelligence and to this language and other things like that. you've been talking some about algorithmic intelligence, as well, if that's the same as collective intelligence; i see you have a paper mentioning it. you say that we're going to get to a state of algorithmic intelligence that has capacities for reflection and creation, communication, collaboration, learning, analysis, and synthesis of data that will be infinitely more powerful and better distributed than they are today. and you, and as you noted earlier, we're making a small move toward that. thinking exponentially, how we've been able to push some of this, it could be quasi exponentially more powerful. so, my question is, what do you do as this develops? what is the role of humanity and humans in this future system that you are imagining? think of driverless cars, that are just a small step in trying to do that, where you have a car that has all the sensors, that can look around and that can drive itself. plus, it is connected to the collective intelligence, such as google maps, so it can look and see, oh the traffic's heavy over here. it can pick the best route, the optimal route. much better than a human could do it. these cars are going to end up being safer than a human driver with only two ears and two eyes. so, is the human out of the loop essentially. once we get to such a big thing and we just ride along on the car. perhaps humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 20 we'll have scientistless science, because the system will be able to process data much better, think of the next experiment, and conduct that experiment faster than we can develop ideas and new theories. so, i just keep getting a feeling that this is potentially great, and i think we're all pushing for it, but we're somewhat leaving ourselves eventually out of the loop. do you see that? pl: i open my phone. i put on the gps with google map and it gives me an itinerary that i don't know. why are they doing this? okay. i will take it. it's shorter because there are traffic jams, and it finds automatically the best, the best itinerary. i prefer the shorter path. it comes from the information that is given by all the people in their cars. so why not? i think the use of this is an example already of smart city, a service that is not given by the mayor or the official city, but it already works like a smart city. so, i think we are going to do more and more in this direction, not afraid at all of the autonomous cars or things like this. we have trains that are, that could go without a chauffeur since years and years. so, it's a difference in degree, not even a real qualitative difference. i speak about algorithmic intelligence, because i have studied a lot the history of cognition. you have a basis that is in our genes, in our brain, and we have exactly the same brain as the prehistoric people. okay. we have exactly the same intelligence, the same brain, the same genes, the same ability to speak and to reason and to tell stories and so on. this is the same for all human beings, but then, when you invent writing necessarily, the people who have writing, they have a better memory. they can accumulate information; they can go through all this information and make inferences. they have a better critical thinking, because the knowledge is in front of us. it's not just the identity with the narratives and so on. so, there is a kind of a written intelligence, and even, okay, let's stop at the difference between orality and writing. then we can go into details, different kinds of writing systems, either ideograms, alphabetic writing. what is your numbering system? what kind of coding of the numbers allows you to make the better algorithm and so on. so, the coding of the information augments our cognitive abilities, but it's an external augmentation. it's not because our brain is different. it's because we have a lot of apparatus around us that allows us to make common memories, to make new operations, and things like this. and then you have the printing press. so, the ability to have several libraries, easy access to information. remember before that we were obliged to recopy the books by hand. it was not easy to have access to information. the printing press was one, not the only, but one of the bases of the scientific revolution of the modern time, because the memory was discharged of remembering of all this information, because it was in the libraries, people were able to observe more and to experiment more. so, basically, cognition is not only a biological process, it's a biological, technical, institutional, and symbolic process. today we are shifting from the cognitive system based on the printing press and on the classic electronic media, radio, television, telephone, and so on, to a cognitive system that is based on the cloud, the humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 21 smartphones, the personal computers, machine learning and so on. so, we have to take this into account and it will help us. and, you know, shortly after the invention of the alphabet or the introduction of the alphabet in ancient cultures, people were very afraid. ah, it's terrible. we have no more memory. the memory will be in the books, and so on. there was one famous dialogue of plato (phaedrus) about this theme. they'd say, writing makes us stupid, because we don't cultivate our memory anymore. so, it's an old process. it has not begun with the computer, but it's a new step and we have to embrace it in order to stay in control, to understand what's going on, what do we want to do with it. we don't want be replaced by artificial intelligence. we want to be augmented by artificial intelligence. we have to take advantage of these new tools, new possibilities, to create new symbolic systems adapted to the current technology. because let's say today, when we write, we write one letter after the other, a word or a phrase is a sequence of characters, and we don't remember that this has been done to register the sounds not the meaning. but today the computers, they don't care about the sounds. they want to compute the meaning. that's why i invented ieml. af: what's interesting is i think all technology is invented to take us out of the loop. as you said, i can write, i don't have to spend all that time trying to memorize things. if i have a wheel, i don't have to put everything on my back. if i have a calculator, i don't have to add. what will human experience be like? what will be the type of human cognition we need to develop in the future? that is what is interesting, especially from an educational perspective. do we need to teach kids to multiply anymore? maybe they need to know or maybe not. people keep saying, oh, we have to teach them to problem solve now. that's interesting. maybe we don't quite know how to do that, however. pl: it's a little bit of what you were saying. we have to know how to command that system and keep being in charge of the system, which is really high-level thinking. it's very meta-thinking. i don't have to drive the car anymore, but i might have to plan my vacation or something like that. the car will take me wherever i want to go as long as i have a really good reason to optimize my experience. so anyway, how are you seeing it? i guess, what's left for humans? we could say art is left for humans. high level planning is left for humans. not in a bad way. i mean that we will focus on that. there'll be a new world. there's a new level of cognitive cooperation that we have to develop. what is left for humans, of course, is creation. everything that involves a formalization because the computers need something formal to work, but they cannot formalize it themselves. so, everything that is creative, but also everything that is social, because you know there will still be babies; there will still be people that are ill; there will still be old people. human beings are inherently and naturally social. so, everything that involves social interaction, i don't think that this will be completely replaced by robots. it's almost impossible. and even in the social media, when we discover that there is a humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 22 bot in front of us, we don't like it; we want real people. so, i think that communication will not disappear at all. not at all. we will multiply our communication and that's it. by the way, that's very addictive. what is really addictive in social media is the communication, and before social media i remember very well you were in the classroom, the professor was speaking and you were speaking with your neighbor, because we were already addicted to communication. ml: well, i, i have another question. we did not speak so far about the anthropological spaces that you identified in your work. is ieml taking us to a new anthropological space or not? is it still within the cybersphere or is it a new step? specifically, i wanted to ask you about the noosphere. is it related to what you do? pl: the theory of the anthropological spaces was formulated 25 years ago, and today i have a tendency to make an analogy between these spaces and the dominant medium of the time. for example, what i call the earth is more or less related to the medium of primary orality before writing, a more direct communication with nature, with the cosmos, and so on. then what i called the territory is very related to writing because it's also the beginning of the state, beginning of agriculture, the beginning of management of complex societies, and so on. then, the space of what i called the commodity space where more or less when you have the alphabet, you have also the birth of money and of more abstract economic exchanges and the development of commerce. of course, there is an enormous inflation, let's say, of the commodity space with the printing press and the industrial revolution, the global markets and so on. what is important to understand is that none of these anthropological spaces will ever disappear. the earth is there, the territory is there, the commodity space is there, even as anticapitalistic as you are, i think it will never disappear. it's there. but what we can do is to use the internet and the new growing algorithmic intelligence to build a new anthropological space on top of all the others. in such a way that it pilots the functioning of all the other spaces. the next space, i call it the knowledge space, a kind of ecosystem of ideas, of the human race at the global level, an ecosystem of ideas that we will be able to observe. in observing these ecosystems of ideas, we are observing our own cognitive processes. that's the whole point of ieml. it is to give a symbolic foundation for this process of a reflexive collective intelligence to occur and to make the relationship with knowledge the dominant factor in the evolution of human society. that's the point. we will never suppress conflicts or power fights, or injustice, or crime. there is always a dark side. i'm not completely utopian, but let's do what we can to improve the situation and to be more conscious of what we are doing together and of the way in which we are in symbiosis with the environment. ml: i saw that you launched the ieml in september 2018. there was a tweet about the launch. is there a way to see the project in an application? humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 23 pl: at the beginning of the summer i went to bologna. i was invited by the foundation golinelli about this project. a lot of people there were very interested. i made also a public event in montreal. the problem is that for the moment, i don’t have a lot of money. what is giving me hope is that i’m working with louis van beurden who is a young mathematician and engineer who just got a master in ai and nlp. i am also currently in a big team that is working in the field of digital humanities at the university of montreal. so, you have to be very patient, as i have been. i am on this project for more than twenty years, and if you read the book collective intelligence, i was already speaking about a super language. i have taken one step after the other. i could give you the link to the dictionary, but i’m not sure that it will be useful today because there are not all the explanations, and so on. but i’m slowly writing the manifesto; there will be applications. before building an international team working on this project, i need to build some pedagogical tools. because it’s a language, you’ll have to explain how it works, and you cannot explain a language in one hour. it’s like any language; it’s complex. so, i’m going to write this book, and i’m going to record a series of videos explaining the language, paradigm by paradigm. i have already a deal with the university of montreal to record the series of videos on this language, and once there is a critical mass of people knowing about the language and able to work on certain projects, that will be concrete progress. but there is a lot of preconditions to make it work properly. if you give me money now, i don’t know what to do with it, because i need a pedagogical basis and a small group of people who are well versed in the language. today we have three or four people, and that’s not enough. ml: how long will it take to develop concrete application? pl: between one and three years, if i'm lucky one year, otherwise three years. but it will happen. af: very interesting. that's an important vision. something to aim toward. you're giving people something that they can work toward. trying to make it real. so that's very nice. pl: i think of even limited projects, especially in the field of digital humanities, because i have always had digital humanities in mind when i was doing it. and, frankly, for the natural sciences, people have specialized languages to express the objects of the natural sciences, like in chemistry you have atoms; in physics everything is very well defined. but in humanities and social sciences, no. it is in this field that we have the biggest need for tools of explicitation, comparisons and so on. a precise qualification of things. so, i think it's the best field. ml: it's a metalanguage basically that is different from the search for the perfect language that has been going on since the beginning of humanity, basically. the language that would allow global communication. humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 24 pl: yes. it's going in that direction. perfect? okay… perfection is impossible in human matters. i would say it will be better than the tools that we have right now. ml: all the attempts to find the perfect language have failed so far. i think that your approach is different because it's a metalanguage and because you have in mind a workable practical language. pl: it's not supposed to be spoken; it's supposed to be a code between the natural languages and the algorithms, and all the apparatus of computations and so on. if you do the comparison in a practical way, at least for the foreseeable future, you should compare it to the documentary metalanguages. let's say you use the dewey system or the library of congress, which are in fact classification systems. on the other hand, you have the semantic metadata for all classifications or ontologies in the framework of the so-called semantic web. ieml is neither an ontology nor a classification. it's a language. so, you can express anything you want and any classification you want; you can compare different classifications, different ways to organize the data, and so on. so, it's a tool for semantic metadata. appendix some paradigms of morphemes for the ieml pierre lévy ieml has the following three properties simultaneously: 1. it is a philological language, according to louis helmslev's definition, i.e. it has the same power of expression and translation as a natural language. 2. it is a regular language in the chomsky sense (its syntax is calculable) 3. its semantics can be calculated, from the level of the morpheme to the level of the text. from a mathematical point of view, ieml is a “topos”, i. e. an algebra (a regular language) in relation of morphism with a topology of semantic relationships. on a philosophical level, i took up the challenge of inventing a symbolic system that makes the most of the new digital environment to serve human cognitive augmentation. it is impossible to explain the ieml parallelism between syntax and semantics in a couple of pages only. i will nevertheless show some paradigms of morphemes that will give the reader some taste of the ieml grammar. then i will show on one example how the morphemes are arranged to compose a word (or a sentence). *** humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 25 keyboard ieml morphemes are made of these 35 letters. the small cap letters on the left of the keyboard result from the non-commutative multiplication (substance x attribute) of the (u, a, s, b, t) primitives. the punctuation marks ( : . ' , _ ; ) show the seven layers of recursive multiplication. all ieml morphemes are the output at layer n of “paradigms” which are multiplication tables from input morphemes at layer n–1. the generation of any morpheme implies the weaving of its semantic relations with other morphemes. there are one hundred paradigms organizing around four thousand morphemes in the current dictionary. the morphemes can be used to build an unlimited quantity of words and the grammar allows for sentences and super-sentences as complex and nuanced as necessary for human expression. ecosystems of collective intelligence the morpheme s.o.-k.o.-' (collective intelligence) has s.o.(concern for thought) in substance and k.o.(desire for social bond) in attribute. the paradigm of layer 4 displayed in the paradigm "ecosystem of ci" has s.o.-k.o.-' (collective intelligence) in constant substance and [m:o:. = j. (idea) + g. (message) + h. (subject) + p. (individual) + c. (object) + x. (body)] as variable attribute. the three rows underline the complementarity between knowledge and messages, people and their ethics, biophysical ecosystem and power. the first column, related to virtuality, interconnects networks of knowledge, will (ethics) and empowerment. the second column, related to actuality, joins networks of messages (or documents), social networks and physical equipment, including physical bodies. figure 1. ecosystems of collective intelligence. humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 26 dialectics of collective intelligence “dialectics of collective intelligence” is a paradigm of layer 5 which refines on the paradigm of layer 4 that we have just described. each row header represents a cell of the paradigm “ecosystems of collective intelligence” of figure “ecosystem”. the rows represent the ternary dialectic that underlies the cells of this previous paradigm. the paradigm “dialectics of ci” is a semantic declension of the former paradigm according to the triad s b t, where s (first column) indicates abstract aspects, b (second column) is related to a personal and affective dimension and t (third column) is bound to concrete and pragmatic facets. figure 2. collective intelligence ecosystems: ternary dialectics. a sustainable human development implies a continuous exchange of resources between the six cells of table "ecosystem". the internal dialectic of these cells is further detailed by the paradigm of figure "dialectics". the fabric of collective intelligence as a whole is described in more detail in other paradigms of the dictionary like humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 27 https://dev.intlekt.io/morpheme/o:m:.-o:m:.-'s.o.-k.o.-', skills at the level of grammar, we find fundamental capacities for action, “basic” competencies. but this does not necessarily mean elementary skills; there can obviously be very high degrees of linguistic competency, self-mastery or sensory motor refinement. grammatical competencies involve the self. they imply discursive or symbolic abilities with regard to signs, emotional or affective energies with regard to beings, and physical skills with regard to things. dialectic includes interactional competencies. in the signs row, the grammatical mastery of codes serves knowledge of a wide variety of subjects, leading to reasoning, and dialog. figure 3. sign | related skills. in the being row, self-esteem and self-mastery serve egalitarian, mutually respectful relationships with others. conflicts and divergent interests are settled through negotiation, while agreements and promises are managed contractually. https://dev.intlekt.io/morpheme/o:m:.-o:m:.-'s.o.-k.o.humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 28 figure 4. being | related skills. in the things row, sensory-motor competencies serve technical know-how involving the manipulation of tools and machines, and the ability to create and maintain concrete environments for life and work. figure 5. thing | related skills. humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 29 once again, dialectical competencies are not “medium” competencies between grammar and rhetoric. each dialectical competency can be distributed on a scale of excellence from minimal to exceptional. the capacity to get things done is to be found in the rhetoric column. communication strategies organize signs and messages so as to accomplish a work of persuasion, reframing (or even deception) as effectively as possible. leadership, the ability to inspire or direct a group, acts on beings, in particular on their social cohesion. finally, engineering is about making things work on things, combining mechanisms for a particular purpose. once again, rhetoric is in no way the “summit” of the competencies since there are obviously many degrees of strategic abilities, from weakness to maximum effectiveness. let us now examine a differentiation of the paradigm m:m:.e.at the next layer. skills related to signs let's analyse the paradigm “skills related to signs” • we have in substance s. (reflexion) b. (language) t. (memory) multiplied by e. (can). we recognize s.e.-, b.e.and t.e.(grammar, dialectic and rhetoric of signs) of figure "skills" • we find in attribute the nine dimensions s. b. t. k. m. n. d. f. l. (see the keyboard) that are multiplied by u. (say, express) in order to indicate actual communication. the paradigm of figure “skills related to signs” is therefore a semantic declension – or a differentiation – of s.e., b.e.and t.e. • the constant mode (the third variable of the semantic multiplication) is wa.e.(mastering competences) [link: https://dev.intlekt.io/morpheme/wa.e.-]. • the meaning of the letters is redefined according to the context of the paradigm. for example, n. (world) in the sixth column stands for literary arts because it is multplied by u. (say, express) and is used in a paradigm of competencies related to signs. literature expresses the "world" of a culture. the reader can see that, as usual, for each row or column, the letters are exactly the same, except for one syntactic role that varies. skills related to beings the paradigm “skills related to beings” is organized in the same way that the previous paradigm except that it shows the semantic declension of k.e.-, m.e.and n.e.instead of s.e.-, b.e.and t.e.-. in addition, a. (commit) is used to modify s. b. t. k. m. n. d. f. l. instead of u. (say, express), because the paradigm is about the actualization of values and good intentions. skills related to things the skills related to things is organized as the two previous paradigms and it expands the third row of the (simple) skills paradigm. https://dev.intlekt.io/morpheme/wa.e.humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 30 the structure of a word in ieml: the example of “colonialism” there are nine syntagmatic roles – or cases – in ieml: the process or verb, the initiator or grammatical subject, the interactant or grammatical object, the recipient or beneficiary, the time, the place, the intention, the manner and the cause. the process is the root of the syntagmatic tree. every actant subordinated to the process (initiator, time, cause, etc.) can be precised by a quality or adjective and – recursively – by a subordinated actant. at the level of the word, each syntagmatic role can be fulfilled by a lexeme that is composed by an inflection poly-morpheme (the first parenthesis in figure 6) and by a content poly-morpheme (the second parenthesis). several lexemes can be linked at the same syntagmatic role by a junction (like “and”, “or”, “but”, etc.). figure 6. possible ieml interpretation of “colonialism.” figure 6 shows one possible interpretation of the english word “colonialism” in ieml. each lexeme is translated by a short line. figure 7 shows the translation of every morpheme individually. humanist studies & the digital age lévy, farley, and lollini 6.1 (2019) 31 figure 7. translation of “colonialism” morphemes. collective intelligence, the future of internet and the ieml interview to pierre lévy by art farley and massimo lollini part i: collective intelligence part ii: the future of internet and the ieml appendix some paradigms of morphemes for the ieml pierre lévy keyboard ecosystems of collective intelligence dialectics of collective intelligence skills skills related to signs skills related to beings skills related to things the structure of a word in ieml: the example of “colonialism” humanist studies & the digital age, 6.1 (2019) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.6.1.3 32 the origins of humanities computing and the digital humanities turn1 dino buzzetti, university of bologna abstract: at its beginnings humanities computing was characterized by a primary interest in methodological issues and their epistemological background. subsequently, humanities computing practice has been prevailingly driven by technological developments and the main concern has shifted from content processing to the representation in digital form of documentary sources. the digital humanities turn has brought more to the fore artistic and literary practice in direct digital form, as opposed to a supposedly commonplace application of computational methods to scholarly research. as an example of a way back to the original motivations of applied computation in the humanities, a formal model of the interpretive process is here proposed, whose implementation may be contrived through the application of data processing procedures typical of the so called artificial adaptive systems. 1. introduction a retrospective overview of the first stages of development of the newly emerged forms of reflection and methodological practices that, in italian, have been properly named informatica umanistica (humanities computing) can also foster a better understanding of the new current trends. as a matter of fact, the limitations of the technological tools available at the time conferred more space to the ideation of what could have been achieved through the application of computational methods. the essential nature of the available technology focused the attention on the vast range of future opportunities enabled by the implementation of computational procedures on the model of the universal turing machine. the origins of humanities computing are therefore characterized by a marked attention to the methodological and theoretical implications of research projects based on the application of computational procedures. the ensuing technological developments produced a rather paradoxical drawback. by polarizing the attention of scholars on the functionalities of application programs occasionally imposing themselves as dominant technologies, they induced a conceptual dependence on the available technology, to the detriment of a well-grounded choice of appropriate methods and alternative solutions. it may therefore be worthwhile to review the successive phases of 1 this article was published in italian: alle origini dell’informatica umanistica: humanities computing e/o digital humanities, in il museo virtuale dell’informatica archeologica, a cura di paola moscati e tito orlandi. atti della “segnatura” (13 dicembre 2017). «rendiconti dell’accademia nazionale dei lincei», classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, s. ix, 30.1-2 (2019), 71-103. http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 33 applied computation characterized by new technological developments in order to evaluate their impact on the research practices of humanities computing and to reconsider its current orientations in the light of the theoretical discussions of its opening phase. 2. the era of the mainframes the initial phase of humanities computing was characterized by employment of large computers available in computer centers, or public or private institutions that used them for administrative purposes. a “special thanks” for the intertextual analysis of the correspondences between two fundamental legal texts of the jewish tradition, conducted by sergio noja in 1968, was addressed “to the management of the s. paolo banking institute of turin,” who made “the electronic computer available,” which in turn made the publication of the essay presenting the results (noja 1968, 582). the most famous example of this type of facility is that of the 56 printed volumes of the index thomisticus prepared by father roberto busa (1974-1980) thanks to the support of thomas j. watson, founder of ibm, and completed, after thirty years of work, only in the 70s. it has surely been noted that both computational projects conducted by the electronico ibm automato resulted in printed publications. at first glance, in an era characterized by the everincreasing pervasiveness of the digital, this seems surprising. however, the paradox is only apparent and, if well considered, leads us to conclusions of a different sort. this circumstance leads us to reflect on the working conditions that the mainframe technology then allowed. the memories, consisting of punched cards and only later of magnetic tapes, did not allow any form of visualization of the data, and the output resulting from their processing was returned in print format from the output units of the computers specifically used. therefore, the purpose of computation could not consist in reproduction and visualization of digital data, or object sources of investigation, but only in the elaboration and analysis of their informational content. in this situation the purpose of the research was primarily directed to computation, that is to the application of computational procedures to objects, in our case, of humanistic research. hence the name of humanities computing or, in italian informatica umanistica, for the research practices of this first period. the possibility of tackling research problems in the humanities with computational methods involved, at this stage and in the absence of technological mediation consisting of instruments already available and ready for use, a reflection directly addressed to the fundamentals of computation. ibm itself is likely to have supported father busa’s project for the opportunity it offered to extend the application of computation, up to that point almost exclusively aimed at processing numeric data, into the realm of processing textual information. therefore, researchers did not simply have to make use of computational tools already set up, and choose those most suitable for the purposes of the research, but they had to contribute their own design, focusing attention on the specific aims of their own research. 3. a definition of humanities computing attention to “the fundamentals of computing theory and science, which today absolutely nobody in humanities computing mentions” (orlandi 2016, 80-81), together with the constant reference to the objectives of the research, led in the first phase of development of humanities computing to a humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 34 definition expressed in the title of nicholas wirth’s widely read book, algorithms + data structures = programs (wirth 1976). in this regard, a volume that appeared at the conclusion of an investigation on the “impact of new technologies in the humanities” in europe included a chapter, coordinated by tito orlandi, dedicated to study of formal methods, in which we find this specification – proposed by manfred thaller – of humanities computing as it was characterized in previous years and understood fundamentally as “applied computer science” (de smedt 1999): we will attempt to define the core in terms of the traditional combination of data structures and algorithms, applied to the requirements of a discipline: the methods needed to represent the information within a specific domain of knowledge in such a way that this information can be processed by computational systems result in the data structures required by a specific discipline. the methods needed to formulate the research questions and specific procedures of a given domain of knowledge in such a way as to benefit from the application of computational processing result in the algorithms applicable to a given discipline. crucial in this definition was the awareness that computation applied to the humanities requires both representation (data structures) and processing (algorithms) of the information contained in the objects of study, a requirement often overlooked in the subsequent phases of development influenced by advances in technology. this essentially theoretical characterization of humanistic information technology placed formalization in the foreground as a necessary and unavoidable prerequisite of research. from this point of view, the “real beginnings” of humanities computing can be directly traced, together with other initial “experiments” to the seminal works of jean-claude gardin (orlandi 2016, 79) on “formalization of aspects of archaeological research connected with the processes of representation and classification of data” (moscati 2013, 7). as paola moscati rightly notes (2013, 10), gardin stated that “the interest of method [...] rather comes from its logical implications, and from the consequences it seeks to provoke in the general economy of the archaeological research” (gardin 1960, 5); and later, in 1971, in a letter to rené ginouvès, gardin reiterated that “[...] the comparative merits of such or such machine model or punch cards since 1955 worried us less than the methods of formalization (mise en forme) of the data and of the archeological reasoning, in the perspective of a ‘mechanization’ conceived without referring to any of these cards or these machines in particular” (jcg 205, 12 january 1971). what mattered more than the technology, therefore, was the formal organization of data. from this point of view jean-claude gardin, “really is at the source of humanities computing” (orlandi 2016, 82). 4. representation vs. data processing subsequently, the impressive technological development that occurred within a few years with the introduction of personal computers, graphic interfaces and then the implementation of the world wide web, profoundly transformed the research practices in the domain of the humanities computing, and greatly influenced the relationship itself between the representation and the elaboration of the content of the data under examination. the new and more advanced opportunities for practical use of computers, made possible by the progressive advancement of technology, have paradoxically humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 35 caused, if not quite a setback, at least one obvious delay in the theoretical elaboration necessary for the planning of applications specifically designed for specific research purposes. once more manfred thaller, in the aforementioned volume, stated that, for an adequate training in humanities computing, “the study of computational methods themselves” was essential to the development of “new methods” for “the explanation,” framed “according to formal principles,” of the phenomena studied in the various humanities disciplines (de smedt 1999). but in the new technological context, the center of the discussion was progressively moving from the investigation of the formalization of research methods and of the applicability of computation, to the evaluation of the possibility of using the new technological tools that gradually became available. the theoretical discussion about the design of applications specifically developed for specific projects of research and their intrinsic methodological implications thus fell into the background. to give just one example, in the years in which exclusively textual terminals were still in use, the graphic layout of a document was decided by the author himself during the composition of the text with the insertion of the markup, or print instructions, in declarative or directly procedural form. subsequently, with the introduction of graphical interfaces, writing programs working in wysiwyg mode (what you see is what you get) automatically inserted the markup, removing from the author the direct control of the layout, which could be carried out exclusively in the ways provided by the program functionalities. the alleviation of effort in the process of composition was obtained at the cost of renouncing the direct design of the graphic characteristics of the document. this example, after all banal and certainly not relevant in terms of research, is nonetheless useful to point out certain consequences, often unnoticed, implicit in the development of technology, and to highlight some actual reasons for the progressive renunciation of the design of computer applications usable for research purposes, in favor of the passive and uncritical use of new instruments thrust upon us. also the very rapid spread of the web has had profound consequences in the evolution of humanities computing. on closer inspection, the specific role of the computer in the practical use of the web is quite limited, since it does nothing but guarantee remote access to data or documents stored at a distance, to be viewed on the computer screen. but the elaboration of the information content of the resources displayed remains entrusted to the reader’s ability to understand and, from this point of view, nothing changes. about the so-called “liberational effect of electronic technology on texts” marilyn deegan and kathryn sutherland have acutely observed that “the narrative of redemption from print” – anticipated by mcluhan and repeated emphatically by its followers of the 90s – did not foresee that further, unimagined, developments in electronic technology, like the google search engine, the brainchild of two college students, would lovingly extend the culture of the book through instant delivery of high-resolution images of the pages of thousands of rare and previously hard-of-access volumes. (deegan and sutherland 2009, 10). therefore, it is possible to assert that one “google book search” – as they emphasize – “is not providing electronic text, it is providing books” (147). in other words, this common tool uses electronic technology to archive and instantly return “simulations of print and manuscript documents” (27). the elaboration of the informational content of the object of study is substantially neglected and the interest is turned to the digital reproduction of the source. that being said, we certainly do not humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 36 want to underestimate the importance of availability of multimedia resources. digital images can, for example, be technically elaborated to improve the readability of deteriorated manuscripts, but the precedence given to the mere visualization of the sources profoundly modified the functionality of the fundamental link between representation and information processing. attention came to be mainly addressed to the representation of information transmitted by objects of study, to the detriment of the elaboration of their contents for purposes of analysis and interpretation. the lack of attention paid to the elaboration of information content of textual data can also be seen in the strategic choices of text encoding initiative (tei), with which in the 90s the community of scholars of humanities established “a standard for the representation of texts in digital form” (tei 2016). the purpose of the tei was indeed to publish guidelines for electronic text encoding and interchange, in order to “define and document a markup language for representing the structural, renditional, and conceptual features of texts,” above all “in the humanities and social sciences” (tei 2015). with the introduction of document production systems, among computer scientists, a so-called document community was formed, which took care of the automation, the visualization and printing processes of the documents, distinct from the community denominated in a similar way data processing or database community, dedicated instead to the design of archives for structured data. now, while for the document community, in the interchange of data between different systems, it was essential to maintain the invariance of the representation of the documents, for the data processing community, it was instead fundamental to ensure the invariance of data processing operations. as a result, while the document community “chose to standardize the representation of data,” to guarantee its interchangeability, the database community “chose to standardize the semantics of data,” by developing “data models that described the logical properties of data, independently of how it was stored,” and regardless of the particular format of their representation. to tell the truth, even the “data semantics was not irrelevant to the document community, but the definition of semantics did seem to be a difficult problem” and the attempts undertaken proved too easily exposed to criticism (raymond et al. 1996, 27). so, for quite similar reasons, attempts to define semantics in the scholarly community, most notably the text encoding initiative, similarly met with resistance. thus, the route proposed by sgml was a reasonable one: promote the notion of application and machine independence, and provide a base on which semantics could eventually be developed, but avoid actually specifying a semantics. (28). the technology of document management systems thus affected the choices for the digital representation of the text and led to the adoption of standard generalized markup language (sgml) as a standard language for the codification of textual data. as a language of simple representation and not data processing – because it lacks a semantics of its own – sgml represented a clear limit for the processing of textual data for the analysis of contents and the interpretation of texts. in the field of humanities computing, the prevalence assigned to the representation as opposed to the processing of information radically changed, in this phase, the prevailing orientations of the research. 5. semantic web and digital humanities in the last and most recent period, the development of technology has had contrasting effects on the research practices of humanities computing. the semantic web project has brought back to the humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 37 fore the fundamental demand for the elaboration of the information accessible online. languages have been developed for the representation of the content of web resources, such as the resource description framework (rdf) and for the construction of formal ontologies. through the use of these languages, the so-called dikw hierarchy (data, information, knowledge, wisdom), already in use in information science, could be treated more formally, allowing meaning to be assigned to data conceived as pure symbols that have not been interpreted and to represent the information conveyed by them through descriptions of the linked content between them. the networks and graphs of semantic relations thus obtained (linked data) made it possible to define connections rigorously and to organize certain fields of knowledge according to logically defined structural relationships and as such to allow the application of real procedures of formal inference. all this made it possible to bring attention back – through the tools provided by semantic web technologies – to the problem of processing the content of digital resources accessible online. at the same time, and against this trend, the use of the expression digital humanities to define the customary field of humanities computing has imposed itself. the deliberate adoption of this name seems to be due to the preference expressed by the publisher blackwell publishing for a catchy title for its companion for the introduction to the discipline (schreibman et al. 2004). however, this has favored the tendency to comprehend under this definition all the phenomena in which the digital medium is used to disseminate contents related to the humanities. even a simple e-book, or all applications for mobile devices designed for the access to multimedia concessions, thus seems to enter the field of interest of humanities computing. the transition from humanities computing to digital humanities also comes explicitly theorized as a positive evolution of humanities computing. in fact, literary and artistic practice itself is more and more taking place in a directly digital form. in a recent interview with the online magazine il lavoro culturale (cultural work) jeffrey schnapp, founder and director of metalab of harvard university, claims to fully share “the point of view according to which a definition of digital humanities that reduced it to the application of a series of it tools for the study of cultural heritage would be a relatively trivial operation,” and argues that already in the 1990s, when the formula, digital humanities, was established in the united states, and we stopped talking about computational humanities or humanistic computing, we wanted to emphasize two aspects: the emergence of the network as a public space and the personalization of the computer... the expression digital humanities marked precisely this moment of transition, in which the distinction between the world of digital technologies and culture in society no longer existed. this is a moment of unification in which there has certainly been a rethink on what research in the field of human sciences can be. consequently, humanities computing should give way to a “new experimental model of the human sciences,” to a new social practice of “knowledge design,” as opposed to nineteenth-century practice of philology (capezzuto 2017). in the face of all this, there is no lack of authoritative positional statements that in different forms instead recommend the opportunity for a return to origins. so john unsworth, already in the title of an essay in which he draws coherent attention to the results achieved in the various phases of humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 38 humanities computing development, urges us to go beyond the simple digital representation of the primary research sources (unsworth 2004): we are, i think, on the verge of what seems to me the third major phase in humanities computing, which has moved from tools in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, to primary sources in the 80s and 90s, and now seems to be moving back to tools, in a sequence that suggests an oscillation that may repeat itself in the future. but whether or not the pattern ultimately repeats, i think we are arriving at a moment when the form of the attention that we pay to primary source materials is shifting from digitizing to analyzing, from artifacts to aggregates, and from representation to abstraction. the exhortation to proceed beyond the simple digital “representation” of the studied documents, passing to the “analysis” of the content and to the “abstraction” necessary for the formal specification of computational procedures, is here quite evident, while the reference to “tools” should be understood as being functional with respect to the formalization of the methods adopted, and not as simple technological devices prepared in advance, regardless of the specific procedures applied, just placed “in the hands of researchers” for the computer-assisted practice of the usual activity of examining and annotating documents (leon s.d.). 6. the “logicism” of jean-claude gardin is it then possible to envisage the forms of this desired return to origins in our new context? the indications are not lacking and many inspiring principles can be drawn precisely from the illuminating anticipations of jean-claude gardin. first of all, in the whole of his theoretical reflection, his rigorous methodological perspective and the reference to its necessary epistemological foundation take a central role. in a text published for the proceedings of a seminar held on 17 january 1994 at the university of bologna, in which he presents the “research program” in which he was engaged “for thirty years” (gardin and borghetti 1995, 17), gardin states that he is interested more than in “extending the field of application of computer science in the human sciences than in the progress and consolidation, with or without the calculator, of methodologies and their epistemological status.» (70). on the other hand, without giving priority to theoretical reflection on the possibility of applying computational methods to the humanities, one would inevitably run “the risk of confusion between the means and the ends of research (70),” and humanities computing would lose those “features of an autonomous intellectual project, with its own tools and goals” that actually characterize it (33). hence the proposal by gardin of the “logicist method” (30 ff) and “of the inevitable reference to epistemology” (19) that the application of this method necessarily involves. in the “analysis of archaeologists’ and historians’ texts” (17), or of the human sciences in general, considered “in their entirety” and as “constructs” (1980) or “scientific constructions” (gardin and borghetti 1995, 19), gardin interest lies not so much, with wittgenstein, in “erecting a building,” but rather “in having the foundations of possible buildings transparently before me” (18; see wittgenstein 1998, 9). it is therefore necessary to face a problem of method and “practical epistemology” (gardin and borghetti 1995, 19), that is, of a type of epistemological reflection which he considers as “an activity whose purpose is to clarify the basic conceptual constructs of the human sciences, as they arise in practice, through the combined study of the symbolic systems that provide the materials, and the chains of operations that govern its architecture (gardin et al. 1987, 29).” humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 39 the logicist method presented by gardin consists therefore in the “study of the mechanisms and foundations of scientific argumentation” (gardin and borghetti 1995, 19) and in applying its principles to scientific «constructions» of the humanities, defined as follows: i define ‘constructions’ the texts elaborated on the model of scientific works, with the following three components: (a) a set of observation facts or data ascertained on any type of foundation; (b) hypotheses or conclusions based on these data and which constitute the end of the construction, its reason for being; lastly, (c), the argument produced to link these two components: data to conclusions or, conversely, hypotheses to the facts, with modalities that can be of different nature: natural reasoning or common sense, mathematics, formal logic, computer science, or any type of conjunction of these instruments that is considered as distinctive of our intellectual procedures in the human sciences (18). the application of the logicist method involves the use of “schematizations,” which in turn are defined – following “the logician j.b. grize” (30) – as “the exercise that aims to isolate the operations called ‘natural logic’, currently practiced in the argument of ordinary language” (31; cf. grize 1974, 204); the schematizations “are therefore nothing more than exercises in transferring into logical or, rather, semiological form, specialized texts in a particular discipline or field of research” (31). the assignment of a logical form to the discursive arguments obtained through the schematizations “shows that every construction can be defined through the combination of two elements” (34), the “initial” propositions that describe the “facts” (35) and the “rewriting operations,” or the discursive passages, “whose sequence constitutes the reasoning” that leads to the “conclusions” (34), that is the propositions called “terminal” (35). the rewriting operations constitute real “logical operations that are in reality particularly diversified” (30) and depend on the peculiar principles of inference of the different “modes of reasoning” (93) that in the “discursive practices” (37) of the human sciences can take the most varied forms: “inductions, implications, abductions, inferences, deductions, etc.” (30) now, “the two elements” of the schematization previously cited are found again unchanged in the structure of the knowledge base in the field of artificial intelligence” and “the organizations thus defined constitute” practically “the specific subject of expert systems or ‘knowledge-based systems.’ ” (35) the result was “the possibility of conceiving the schematizations as one source of knowledge for the elaboration of expert systems or, conversely, expert systems as a possible development of schematizations” (36); and “the computational paradigm” could become “the main tool” of the logicist analysis, that is, of that “rewriting modality which consists in expressing interpretative constructions in the form of chains of propositions that link observed data” to theoretical statements such as “in a calculation procedure” (gardin 1993, 12). the adoption of the computational tool, therefore, originates from a precise methodological choice and is based on the “homology” between the “architecture” of expert systems and that of schematizations (gardin and borghetti 1995, 36). now, the more relevant aspect related to the switching to expert systems “concerns the ‘added value’” which is expected to be obtained “on the epistemological level” in which our scientific arguments are situated. but if, on the one hand, “the mandatory conversion of rewriting operations in reasoning ‘rules’ ” offers the possibility of “applying these rules in an experimental way, through simulations aimed at proving their validity”; on the other hand, “nothing allows us to affirm that our discursive practices can be assimilated to the true and humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 40 proper, and rigorously formal, rules of reasoning” (37). the computational methodological option thus requires an equally well-founded epistemological justification. 7. epistemological reflection and expert systems in response to the alleged “scientist infection” of which he would be a victim (gardin 1993, 15) and to other criticisms of his logicist approach, gardin presents a thorough picture of the contrasting positions in an attempt to arrive at an adequate characterization of the method of human sciences, without, however, refraining from considering “the limits and possibilities of logicism” (19). among the different positions taken into consideration we can distinguish, on the one hand, those that presuppose an exclusive “dualism” between the expositional methods of the human sciences and those of the natural sciences (gardin and borghetti 1995, 18-19) and, on the other, the “middle positions” that insist on the intermediate nature of the human and social sciences “should one characterize them only by negations (‘neither this nor that’), or should one opt for an intermingling of categories (‘a little of this, a little of that’)” (gardin 1999, 125). in this debate, the position of logicism “seems to be confused with that of the human sciences themselves, in that ‘entre-deux’ (passeron 1991) where they intend to legitimize their location today,” unless they put in question the very definition of “this ‘third way’ of knowledge which, according to the some, would not be that of science or literature; according to the others, it would be neither that of the symbolic constructions, separated from the logic and ‘natural’ languages, nor entirely that of argumentation current in everyday life.” (gardin 1993, 19). rather than following this debate in detail, it is important to note here that gardin declares that he “feels uncomfortable in these intermediate spaces where the rules of the discursive game remain obscure” (1999, 125), even admitting in the end, that the “substance de l’entredeux, elle, m’echappe” (1991a, 32). indeed, it is perhaps more important to observe that, today, both the epistemological reflection and the most up-to-date computational procedures actually seem to converge in offering a way out that addresses the issue gardin leaves unresolved. in retrospect, its difficulty seems to depend upon the state of research in the field of expert systems at that precise moment and upon the availability of inference engines, which at the time were still too tied to the classical model of hypothetical-deductive reasoning, typical of the natural sciences. now, however, a possibility of solution is in sight, in full compliance with the homology recognized by gardin between the “logical form” (1995, 31) of the scientific constructions of the human sciences and the procedures of formalized inference of expert systems; and all this without overthrowing, however, from another point of view, the relationship of priority between the adoption of the logicist method and the “computer applications” that accompany it, but which – it should be reiterated – “do not constitute its main objective, nor its inevitable extension” (1993, 12). therefore, it seems appropriate to pay attention to the possibility of a more detailed analysis of the interpretative and inferential practices of the texts expressed in natural language both in general and, for what concerns us more directly, in the field of human sciences. 8. adaptive systems and methodological issues in this regard, in an essay published on archeologia e calcolatori we find an affirmation that sounds almost surprising to those who usually rely on the classical deterministic paradigm of computation, but that is, however, of particular importance for our purposes since it is precisely based on the humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 41 “homology” already highlighted by gardin between the “architecture” of the expert systems and that of the schematizations of scientific constructions expressed in natural language (gardin and borghetti 1995, 36). this essay is dedicated to the epistemological foundations of “adaptive systems,” whose theory developed thanks to contributions from “several fields” of research such as biology, cognitive sciences, and artificial intelligence (cf. holland 1962, 297). precisely at the beginning massimo buscema, the author of this essay, writes expressly, “i shall use an analogy to explain the difference” or, to say it in a better way, the relationship, “between artificial science and natural language; the computer is to the artificial sciences as writing is to natural language” (2014, 53). in other words, in the artificial sciences, the computer is what writing represents for natural language: the artificial sciences consist of formal algebra for the generation of artificial models (structures and processes), in the same way in which natural languages are made up of semantics, syntax and pragmatics for the generation of texts. (2011, 17) it follows that in the “artificial adaptive systems,” that are “part of the vast world of natural computation” – which constitutes in turn “a subset of the artificial sciences” – the functioning of the texts composed in ordinary language is assimilated, in an apparently unexpected way, to the algorithmic operation of the computer. what is illustrated here, in fact, is a homology between the forms of computation and the analysis of cultural phenomena, which amounts to a renewed proposal of the homology already theorized by jean-claude gardin between the schematizations of scientific constructions in the humanities and the architecture of expert systems. in this sense, we can also read the definition of artificial science proposed by buscema: “artificial sciences are those sciences for which an understanding of natural and/or cultural processes is achieved by the recreation of those processes through automatic models” (2013, 17). one could then almost say that gardin’s logicism also fits, like the adaptive systems studied by buscema, in the field of the so-called “natural computing,” which is, however, described as “the computational version of the process of extracting ideas from nature to develop computational systems” (de castro 2006, 3). in both cases, the homology between discursive procedures and automatic systems works in reverse: while in natural computation the rules of the system adapt to the processes from which they are derived, in gardin’s logicist analysis, the discursive schematizations are necessarily adapted to the formal rules of the expert system in use. among the expert systems examined by gardin and the adaptive systems studied by buscema there is therefore a crucial difference. what is characteristic of the adaptive systems is the presence of “rules that determine the conditions of possibility of other rules”; by their nature, these rules – formed by ‘constraints (links)’ which give the artificial models of natural processes the capacity to dynamically generate other rules – “are similar to the kantian transcendental rules” and constitute the regulatory overarching principles on which the adaptive functioning of the system depends. in this way, natural computation does not try to recreate natural and/or cultural processes by analyzing the rules which make them function, and thus formalizing them [statistically] into an artificial model. on the contrary, natural computation tries to recreate natural and/or cultural processes by constructing artificial models able to create local rules dynamically and therefore capable of change in accordance with the process itself. (buscema 2013, 20) based on these considerations, the idea of building an adaptive model of this type – functional with respect to the analysis of texts expressed in natural language, in order to overcome the difficulty humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 42 encountered by gardin in assigning a well-defined logical form to that intermediate form of argument that seems plausibly proper to all humanistic disciplines – looks quite legitimate, without thereby legitimizing non-clarified discursive rules and the residual mingling of models. even from a more general epistemological point of view, “this ‘third way’ of knowledge,” still viewed with suspicion by gardin (1993, 19), has some plausible justifications. it is true that even the field of humanistic research can be subdivided in “two sectors,” one more strictly “governed by logic” and the other “governed by what you might call intuition”. it is also true that it is “difficult to subject intuition to scrutiny” for validity (orlandi 2016, 79), an objection that gardin frequently aims at positions that are prone to justify “the plurality and accumulation of interpretations” (1999, 119), without defining a precise criterion for validation. however, “a phenomenologically inclined cognitive scientist,” reflecting on the origins of cognition, might reason as follows: we reflect on a world that is not made, but found, and yet it is also our structure that enables us to reflect upon this world. thus, in reflection we find ourselves in a circle: we are in a world that seems to be there before reflection begins, but that world is not separate from us. for the french philosopher maurice merleau-ponty, the recognition of this circle opened up a space between self and world, between the inner and the outer. this space was not a gulf or divide; it embraced the distinction between self and world, and yet provided the continuity between them. its openness revealed a middle way, an entre-deux. (varela et al. 1991, 3) the recognition of this entre-deux, of this intermediate path between the self and the world, brings into play the fundamental relationship between the subject and the object of knowledge. gardin also considers the problem posed by the “incisive formula,” frequently cited in epistemological debates, of the retour en force du sujet (1991b, 99); however – without going into the discussion of the complex relationship between model or subjective representation of phenomena and objective reality, or between observer and observed – he tends to treat the “subject” from a predominantly objective point of view and to deal above all with the “objective evaluation of the role of the subject in human sciences” (98). suffice it to mention, however, that in the face of this, even in the natural sciences and especially in physics, the problem has been addressed in a direct way: “when a theory is highly successful and becomes firmly established, the model tends to become identified with ‘reality’ itself, and the model nature of the theory becomes obscured,” writes the theoretical physicist hugh everett, who thus goes on: once we have granted that any physical theory is essentially only a model for the world of experience, we must renounce all hope of finding anything like “the correct theory.” there is nothing which prevents any number of quite distinct models from being in correspondence with experience (i.e., all "correct"). (everett 1973, 134) also in physics, therefore, the ‘multi-interpretation,’ considered so problematic by gardin, does not cause scandal and, except for the criterion of empirical conformity, the problem of choice doesn’t arise anymore. then the question shifts rather to the formal reconstruction of the interpretative process in the discursive practices of the ‘third way’ mainly followed in the human sciences, whose characterizing element seems to be constituted precisely by a form of self-referentiality, which includes in itself the role of the observer. thus, one understands the relevance of the processes of redefining their own rules which are typical of automatic adaptive systems. formal analysis of self-referential humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 43 procedures of internal transformation imposes itself as the primary task of a research that can be extended – thanks to the analogy previously reported – to the interpretative practices of the texts expressed in natural language. 9. ordinary language: formal model and natural computation which formal model can therefore be proposed for the representation and the formal analysis of the texts in natural language, which constitute the main product of scientific constructions in the humanities? inspiration can come only from an analysis of language and from the perception of the enormous distance that separates the rigid “formalist’s motto” – characteristic of one of the most raw formulations of good old-fashioned artificial intelligence (gofai), if you take care of the syntax, the semantics will take care of itself (haugeland 1985, 106) and the compelling image of the connection between the text and its meaning offered by samuel beckett: there are many ways in which the thing i am trying in vain to say may be tried in vain to be said. (1965, 123) this illuminating sentence dissolves with immediate naturalness the extreme trivialization of the relationship between syntax and semantics of the previous maxim. in the conception of good oldfashioned artificial intelligence, a formalization of the syntax should lead to an alleged one-to-one correspondence between the syntactic structure and the semantic structure of the text, an assumption which persists also philosophies of language of analytical orientation. as davidson maintains, “to give the logical form of a sentence is, then, for me, to describe it in terms that bring it within the scope of a semantic theory” (davidson 1970, 145). the illusory postulation of this cherished one-to-one relation between syntax and semantics is completely debunked by the iconic representation of the fundamental indeterminacy of the relationship between the many ways of saying the same thing and the many ways to understand what is said by the same sentence: an identical content can admit different forms of expression, while an identical expression each time can be assigned different meanings. here we encounter opposite conceptions of the relationship between the “expression” and the “content” of the text (see hjelmslev 1961, 47-60). following saussure, who speaks of a plane of ideas (plan... des idées) and a plane of sounds (celui... des sons), (49) hjelmslev states that an adequate description of the functioning of language “must analyze content and expression separately,” and that each of the two analyses may identify a certain number of entities “which are not necessarily susceptible of one-to-one matching with entities in the opposite plane” (46). on the one hand, the logicians, perhaps too conditioned by the symbolic character of the formal languages, are led to suppose that a syntactic system has “essentially the same structure as a semiotic” system and to consider it “normative for the concept of a semiotics.” on the other hand, for linguists it is the language which must be “considered as normative” for the functioning of a syntactic system (110). accordingly, the task of the linguistic theoretician is not merely that of describing the actually present expression system, but of calculating what expression systems in general are possible as expression for a given content system, and vice versa. (105) humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 44 in fact, “the two planes,” the syntactic one and the semantic one, “cannot be shown to have the same structure throughout,” with a “one-to-one relation” between the functioning of the one and the functioning of the other (112). therefore, while a logician like carnap proposes “a sign-theory where, in principle, any semiotic is considered as a mere expression system without regard for the content,” from a linguistic point of view the “formal” description “is not limited to the expression-form, but sees its object in the interplay between the expression-form and a content-form” (110-111). however, it would be misleading to think that the radical difference between the two different conceptions of the relationship between the expression and the content of the text puts into question the possibility of establishing a functional homology between the discursive practices of ordinary language and the most advanced systems of artificial intelligence and natural computation. in jeanclaude gardin’s view, the formalization of the scientific production of the humanistic disciplines consists essentially in the formalization of the discours savant (1974, 57): in fact, the possibility of formalizing the textual phenomena in no way requires, as a necessary condition, a one-to-one correspondence between the syntactic structure and the semantic structure of the text. rather, it is necessary to reflect on other characteristic aspects of the text and in particular on its diacritical or selfreferential forms of expression. also, in this regard, however, the approach of the logicians and that of the linguists diverge. as hjelmslev observes, “the logistic theory of signs finds its starting point in the metamathematics of hilbert,” which considers the system of mathematical symbols only as “a system of expression-figurae with complete disregard of their content,” and which treats its “transformation rules,” or rules of rewriting as gardin would say, “without considering possible lnterpretations.” the same method was then “carried over by the polish logicians into their ‘metalogic’” and eventually “brought to its conclusion by carnap” (1961, 110). in particular, hjelmslev, who had defined language in general as “a semiotic into which all other semiotics may be translated,” (109) argues that this is the advantage of everyday language, and its mystery. and this is why the polish logician tarski (who reached the same conclusion independently of the present author) rightly says that everyday languages are characterized in contrast to other languages by their ‘universalism.’ (1970a, 104-105) for tarski, on the other hand, rather than constituting an advantage, it is presumably just this universality of everyday language which is the primary source of all semantical antinomies, like the antinomies of the liar or of heterological words. (1956, 164) in fact, “one does not realize that the language about which we speak must not at all coincide with the language in which we speak” and if the semantics is elaborated in that same language, the analysis of antinomies shows that “the language which contains its own semantics and within which the logical rules commonly accepted apply must inevitably be inconsistent” (1936, 2). so while for hjelmslev “owing to the universalism of everyday language, an everyday language can be used as metalanguage to describe itself as object language,” (1970a, 132) for tarski “in contrast to natural languages, the formalized languages do not have universality.” (1956, 167). in fact, formal languages are developed as pure symbolic systems regardless of the content and for this reason, “when we investigate the language of a formalized deductive science, we must always distinguish clearly between the language about which we speak and the language in which we speak,” (167), between the “metalanguage” and the “language under investigation” (172). however, proceeding in this way, the normative relationship humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 45 between semiotic structure and logical structure is reversed and what is deemed to be an obstacle due to the self-referentiality of natural language is avoided through the sharp separation of the “metalanguage,” the language “to describe,” from the “object language,” the “language described” (hjelmslev 1970a, 132). but it is precisely the search for the forms of expression of metalinguistic import within the natural language that can make our investigation proceed to the construction of a formal model of its self-referential semiotic system. to use hjelmslev’s linguistic terminology natural language can actually be described as a “semiotics” that includes its “metasemiotics,” which is more specifically described as “a semiotics whose content plane is a semiotic” (1961, 114), also expressed in the natural language itself. 10. the markup: diacritical function and self-referential cycle a useful starting point for this research can be found precisely by considering the current model for the digital representation of the text. it is well known that the text understood from a computational point of view as a data type of, that is, exclusively as “information coded as characters or sequences of characters” (day 1984, 1), fails to represent all the information contained in the text understood in its current meaning. to solve this problem one resorts to the markup, whose standard form, accepted by the community of scholars of the humanities, consists in embedding, in the ordered sequence of the set of characters, marks or tags that define the properties of its partial segments or subsets. now, if the markup represents textual information, the legitimate question arises about the status assumed by the markup in relation to the text. thus, as allen renear puts it, one can enquire “about just what markup really is,” and in particular, “when it is about a text and when it is part of a text,” or in other words whether it belongs to the object language or the metalanguage of the text, without however excluding that “it may sometimes be both” (2000, 419). trying to arrive at a satisfactory answer, we can examine the case of punctuation. alluding to the importance of this topic for the interpretation of the text, the title of a book dedicated to punctuation, eats, shoots and leaves (truss 2003), presents an interesting example: written with the comma the title means “eats, shoots and leaves” and can allusively describe the rude behavior of a young man invited to dinner by a friend; written without comma it means “eats buds and foliage” and may describe the eating habits of a panda. now that comma, which completely changes the meaning of the sentence or of single words like shoots and leaves, can be considered, like any other another diacritical sign of the text, both as an element of the text, in that it is part of the writing system, and as an indication or a metalinguistic rule, as it prescribes the way in which the text must be interpreted. it therefore can be affirmed that “punctuation is not simply part of our writing system,” but that “it is a type of document markup” (coombs et al. 1987, 935). along the same lines, the condition of the markup in general can be assimilated to that of a diacritical sign which, as such, has a double function: when it is used “to describe a document’s structure” (raymond et al. 1992, 1) it carries out a metalinguistic function, but since it is expressed with “assigned tokens” which denote “specific positions in a text” (4) it constitutes itself the structure. the markup is therefore “simultaneously embedded and separable” from the text, is “part of the text, yet distinguishable from it” (3). therefore, because it “denotes structure” in the text and at the same time it “is structure” itself (buzzetti 2002, 80), the markup plays with respect to the text – in addition to “a properly diacritical function” – also “a self-reflexive function” and “can be considered, respectively, as an extension of the expression that humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 46 explains its structure” and the implicit rules that determine it, “as a form of external reference to its functional and structural aspects” (buzzetti 2000). in short, “markup is at once representation and representation of a representation” (buzzetti 2002, 81). because of its ambivalent nature, every form of diacritical expression generates a cyclic process (markup loop) within the textual dynamic: we may say that an act of composition is a sense-constituting operation that brings about the formulation of a text. the resulting expression can be considered as the self-identical value of a senseenacting operation. by fixing it, we allow for the indetermination of its content. to define the content, we assume the expression as a rule for an interpreting operation. an act of interpretation brings about a content, and we can assume it as its self-identical value. a defined content provides a model for the expression of the text and can be viewed as a rule for its restructuring. a newly added structure mark can in turn be seen as a reformulation of the expression, and so on, in a permanent cycle of compensating actions between determination and indetermination of the expression and the content of the text. (buzzetti and mcgann 2006, 68) all this can also be appropriately expressed with a diagram (fig. 1). it is worthwhile to pause and consider in more detail some of the formal aspects both of the cycle and of the diagram that represents it. the diagram refers in particular to the markers that complete the digital representation of the text and that can be inserted inside it, or be made up of external elements connected through pointers to certain positions in the linear sequence of the characters. since there is no direct correspondence between the elements of the syntactic structure and the elements of the semantic structure, the internal (embedded) markup – as it is part of the sequence of characters and it forms itself its structure – diacritically describes syntactic and expressive properties of the text. the external markup (stand-off), on the other hand, not being bound to the linear structure of the expression of the text, can freely express aspects that are not necessarily linear in the structure of its content. in the multidimensional diagram of the self-referential cycle of the text, there is therefore a correspondence between the dimension of the expression and that of the internal markup, as well as that of the content and external markup. humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 47 figure 1. the markup loop (buzzetti and mcgann 2006, 68). the dual linguistic and metalinguistic function of the markup owing to its diacritical nature means that the same marker is both a self-identical element of the expression of the text, and a rule that determines the structure of the content and defines its specific elements, which in turn behave in the same way with respect to the expression. therefore, the structural diacritical elements of expression and content can be considered both as the result of a restructuring operation and as the operations themselves that determine, respectively, the organization of the structure, both of the expression and of the content of the text. formally, therefore, they can be understood as values of a function, or as the functions themselves which formally represent the rules for structuring the text. the relationship between the formal representation of the value of the function and the formal representation of the function or the rule itself, deserves to be carefully considered from the logical point of view, in order not to run into serious confusion between the linguistic and the metalinguistic levels present in natural language. in his careful analysis of ordinary language use, gilbert ryle appropriately cautions against easy “category-mistakes” (1949, 17) which one incurs if one does not pay attention to the “logical type or category,” (16) of commonly used expressions. as for what concerns us, ryle observes that “a ‘variable’ or ‘open’ hypothetical statement” (120) – that is, a propositional function that contains variables, and all propositions of this type that express lawstatements or a rule – “belong to a different and more sophisticated level of discourse from that, or those, to which belong the statements of the facts that satisfy them” (121). these propositions therefore constitute real rules of inference, for a law is used as, so to speak, an inference-ticket (a season ticket) which licenses its possessors it to move from asserting factual statements to asserting other factual statements (121). so the rules of inference, and with them the diacritical expressions we are dealing with, can be considered as statements of a higher order that belong to the logical type of the “inference-licenses,” studied by stephen toulmin in the uses of argument (2003, 91), who by his own admission “owes humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 48 much” to ryle’s ideas, which he also “applied to the physical sciences” in his own philosophy of science (2003, 239). in his review of this work, ernest nagel (1954) observes that, thanks to the so-called deduction theorem, the principle, now “canonical in modern logical theory” (405), that “a rule of inference can in general be replaced by a premise,” holds in the case of our inference-licenses, and that “in the case of material rules of inference,” consisting of true non-tautological propositions like the ones we are dealing with, “this can apparently always be done.” nagel tells us too that this “maneuver” can also “be introduced in reverse” (406). this means, according to standard logic, that the same sentence can act both as a first-order asserted premise in the object language, and as a rule of inference in the metalanguage. one should note that while in logic the object language and the metalanguage are necessarily kept separate – and are made up of statements respectively in the “material” and in the “formal mode of speech,” to use the terminology introduced by carnap (1934), or by statements de re and statements de voce, to use a terminology drawn from the use of medieval logical latin (henry 1984), a technicized, but still natural language – in the case of ordinary language, which contains its own metalanguage, inference rules are expressed by statements. such object-language higher-order de re statements are however inferentially equivalent to first-order de voce statements expressed in an external metalanguage, separated from the object language. consequently, in natural language, self-referential object-language diacritical expressions take on a double function: considered as first-order statements, they are used as structural markers both of the expression and the content of the text; whereas considered as second-order statements, they constitute rules of inference which are used as functions of the expression to determine the structure of the content or, conversely, rules of inference used as functions of the content to determine the structure of the expression. 11. generalization of the model still on a formal level, we can observe that the structure of the markup cycle, represented above – which can however be generalized for all forms of diacritical expression – corresponds exactly to the “conversational cycle,” which according to frederick parker-rhodes represents the actual “speech process” between the speaker and the listener (1978, 16) or, dealing with texts, between the writing and the reading of a text (fig. 2). humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 49 figure 2. the conversational cycle (parker-rhodes 1978, 16). in this cycle, the “expression” (a) is an operation performed by the speaker “which takes a ‘thought’ as input (which we must think as formalized in some manner)” and produces a “text” (b). one should note, incidentally, that here by expression we mean an operation, which is a function of the content, and not its result, a fact that proves the ambivalence of the diacritical mark on which it operates. in turn, the “comprehension” (c), or interpretation, is an operation performed by the listener, who receives the text as an “input containing all the information imparted to it by the speaker” and that produces “again a thought” (d) as its “output” (17). it is clear, regardless of the use of a different terminology, that the structure of this cycle corresponds exactly to that of the previously examined markup cycle (fig. 1). however, an important observation by parker-rhodes should not be overlooked. it explicitly refers to the indeterminacy of the interpretation process: the “thought that the speaker had intended to convey,” once received and interpreted in the mind of the listener, “could produce the elaboration of a new thought” as a “result” (17). in this case the diagram could take the form of an open spiral, which is more suitable to represent the case of several possible interpretations (fig. 3). humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 50 figure 3. the helicoidal cycle (gardin 1980, 45). such a cycle could end at some point, returning to the starting point, or proceed indefinitely, depending on the context in which a given expression of the text is received. jean-claude gardin also recognizes as “self-evident” the “cyclical nature” of the process of scientific construction. however, similarly to parker-rhodes, he believes that the cycle is not necessarily closed and therefore can be best represented by a “helicoidal curve,” more suited to retrace “the successive steps of its formation,” which are produced through a series of choices, depending not only on the data and their organization, but also and above all on the “logico-semantic rules of interpretation” and the different “interpretative models” that are equally possible (1980, 145). 12. epistemological foundations the analysis of the cyclical nature of discursive practices brings us back again to the question of its epistemological foundation. as gardin observes, the process of scientific construction can be considered both “from within,” and “from without,” or in other terms, subjectively from the author’s point of view, and objectively from the point of view of those who examine it, as an alternative to other constructions, in order to express a judgment of “validation” (145). this allows us to better evaluate the intermediate nature of the humanistic disciplines’ methodology, which many locate in the entre-deux between the predominantly objective nature of the methods of the natural sciences and the predominantly subjective nature of literary or discursive production in general. in other words, one has to decide whether this entre-deux divides or joins the two points of view, establishing what relationship exists between the subject and the object, or else the subjectivity and the objectivity absolutely considered. the cyclic and self-referential nature of the discursive process, which in the ordinary language form of expression jointly includes both the representation of its own object, and the representation of the way in which the subject represents it, inclines towards an answer that excludes the absolute separation between the subject and the object, or in other words between the observer and the observed. this is the position embraced, for example, by the theorists of autopoiesis (varela et al. 1991), that draw inspiration from the epistemological discourse of maurice merleau-ponty and his notion of “chiasm.” in one of his most iconic descriptions, merleau-ponty presents the chiasm as humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 51 an exchange between me and the world, between the phenomenal body and the “objective” body, between the perceiving and the perceived: what begins as a thing ends as consciousness of the thing, what begins as a “state of consciousness” ends as a thing exchange between me and the world, between the phenomenological body and the ‘objective body’ between the perceiver and the perceived: what begins as a thing ends as consciousness of the thing, what begins as a “state of consciousness” ends up as a thing. (1968, 215) in his essay on la structure du comportement, in order to clarify the connection between the subject and the object, merleau-ponty, once again, cites (1942, 11) the physiologist viktor von weizsacker, who describes that relation in these terms: “the properties of the subject and the intentions of the subject (...) not only mix with each other, but also constitute a new whole” (1927, 45). this means that the subject and the object must not be conceived as separate, but as constantly connected in a continuous process of “overlapping or encroachment (empiétement)” (merleau-ponty 1968, 123), as if one would over and over again take the place of the other. the chiastic interlacement thus consists of a relationship of “activity and passivity coupled,” (261) a representing and being represented of the subject and the object both in language and perception. thus, the understanding of the “chiasm,” as described by merleau-ponty, leads to the conclusion that language, understood as natural language, “is the same” thing that simultaneously represents and is represented, but not the same “in the sense of real identity,” but rather “the same in the structural sense,” that is, in the sense of a unique and selfidentical semiosis, which also includes the semiosis that represents it (261). the same relationship between the subject that represents and the object being represented, when conceived as ‘the same thing,’ that is, as the ‘new whole’ that they constitute, is found in the notion of the subject proper to the cybernetics “of the second order,” the cybernetics of the “observing systems,” in which “the observer enters the system by stipulating his own purpose,” as opposed to the cybernetics of the “observed systems,” or “first-order” cybernetics, in which “the observer enters the system by stipulating the system’s purpose” (von foerster 2003, 285-286). thus, in this context, one can find this enlightening definition of the subject: “i am the observed relation between myself and observing myself.” (257). here the subject is defined as one and the same thing, a new whole, constituted by the representation of the relationship between the self observing itself and the self observed by itself. hence the idea that the conception of systemic self-referentiality – that takes place, for example, both in natural language and in its formal model – could constitute a new fundamental scientific paradigm. a new paradigm of this kind necessarily leads one to believe that the nature of the human sciences can be considered as an intermediary one, only as long as the natural sciences and the literary or the discursive disciplines in general are conceived of as absolutely separate and incompatible with each other. however, the recognition of the unavoidable relationship between the observer and the “systems observed,” or the principle of the autonomous organization of the “observing systems,” today extends manifestly beyond the field of the disciplines characterized by the interpretive method to the field of the physical and biological sciences. thus, the paradigm of self-referentiality seems to open a new perspective of convergence between the methods of the natural sciences and the methods of the human sciences, whose median nature would then be based more on the nature of the object of the investigation than on the specific nature of the method whereby knowledge is constructed. humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 52 13. subjectivity and objectivity: formalization and implementation at this point, our diagram of the self-referential cycle of the discursive process can be reconsidered, taking into account the reflexive character of the relationship between the subject and the object. language, in as much as it is seen as expression, is subjective, because it is the representation of the form of our act of representing; however, in as much as it is seen as content, language is objective, because it is the representation of the form of what it represents. in turn, a form of diacritical expression of the text, subjective in itself, can be considered both from an objective point of view, as an element of the expression identical to itself, and from a subjective point of view, as a function that determines a structural element of the content (fig. 4). the same can be said of an element of the content: objective in itself, which can be considered both from an objective point of view as an element identical to itself, and from a subjective point of view as a function that determines a structural element of the expression. figure 4. subjectivity and objectivity in the speech process (parker-rhodes 1978, 16). the distinction between something subjective and something objective is therefore a recursive distinction that could continue indefinitely (fig. 5): humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 53 figure 5. recursiveness of the subjective/objective distinction. but this does not happen, for the very reason that language is self-referential, as one can clearly infer from the diagram shown in fig. 6: figure 6. chiastic self-referentiality of the subjective/objective distinction. it can be reasonably assumed that this scheme represents a possible formal model of the ‘chiasm,’ that is, of the relationship between the subject and the object that involves a continuous process of mutual “encroachment, infringement (empiétement, enjambement)” (merleau-ponty 1964, 175), or reciprocal displacement, dismissal, and override. an image of continual oscillation between what is subjective and what is objective, as an uninterrupted process, is aptly allusive of the self-referential mobility of the text and the dynamic nature of the ambivalence of the diacritical structural elements of both the expression and the content of the text. this is an aspect which cannot be described only metaphorically, but which finds formal expression also in rigorous mathematical terms. as david hestenes writes about the mathematician who introduced the algebras that bear his name, humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 54 clifford may have been the first person to find significance in the fact that two different interpretations of number can be distinguished, the quantitative and the operational. on the first interpretation, number is a measure of “how much” or “how many” of something. on the second, number describes a relation between different quantities. (1999, 60) in other words, seen from the latter point of view, a number describes the operation that connects two different quantities. the same concept of ambivalence between value and function can be found in the “calculus of indications” introduced by the english mathematician george spencer brown (1969, 11): he admits that there can be a “partial identity of operand and operator,” since an operand “is merely a conjectured presence or absence of an operator” (88). granted that a rigorous formalization of such a model is possible, it can be surmised that a computational implementation could be obtained by developing a suitable adaptive system, endowed with functional capabilities as those previously illustrated. if the adaptive artificial systems that we described are built on the basis of a recognized analogy with the operation of natural language, that is, foreseeing the presence of rules capable of modifying other rules of the system, the same analogy allows us to suppose that a formal model of the discursive processes of natural language could be implemented precisely using an adaptive computational system of the same type. ln fact, the ambivalence of precise mathematical objects strictly defined (operation and operand, function and value), can constitute the formal expression of the relationship between subject and object that we have described by recalling the epistemological notion of the ‘chiasm.’ secondly, it is precisely the indeterminate character of the relationship between syntax and semantics in the natural language that gives origin to the self-referential cycle of “rules” of the second order “that establish the conditions of possibility of other rules” of the system (buscema 2013, 20). thus, in this way, the road is open for the possibility of implementing a computational model of the discursive processes proper to scientific constructions in the humanities, consisting in an automatic system of an adaptive type. 14. conclusions this concludes our long, extended argument aimed at supporting the opportunity for a return to the origins of humanities computing to avoid the risk, of which jean-claude gardin has made us aware, of exchanging means for research purposes. the period of the origins, or the so-called humanities computing, was distinguished by an attitude aimed primarily at reflecting on the methods and their epistemological foundations, as a preliminary condition to the choice of computational means suitable for the solution of the research problems of a specific disciplinary field. subsequently, subordination to the rapid technological development of the 1990s, favoring the importance of the digital medium in artistic and literary production, has actually reversed this relationship. the priority given to practices of cultural production directly in digital forms and to research activities assisted by the computer, although still conducted in all-traditional forms, has produced a veritable mutation of the humanities computing practice of the original period and led to the advent of the so-called digital humanities. thus, interest has abated in what jerome mcgann considers, in this new digital environment, the urgent and very current philological “imperative” of the “preservation of cultural memory” (2012), in agreement with the famous definition of august boeckh, die erkenntnis des erkannten. humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 55 in the second part of the essay, i therefore tried to present, through an example, a form of restoration of the original humanities computing attitude to deal with theoretical and methodological issues in regard to the interpretation of texts. building on the thoughts of jean-claude gardin on the analysis of discursive practices in the human and social sciences – in particular, on the homology between the structure of knowledge base expert systems and the structure of the schematizations of data and argumentations in humanities scientific texts – i have noted a significant convergence, or rather a substantial homology, between the analysis of the self-referential phenomena of natural language and the establishment of data processing rules in automatic adaptive systems. thus, this correspondence has allowed me to outline a formal model for the analysis of the interpretative practices of texts in ordinary language congruent with data processing procedures proper of adaptive systems. a possibly successful implementation of this model would undoubtedly confirm the fecundity, for humanities computing, of a re-proposal of the priority of the theoretical and methodological reflection that particularly characterized the period of its origins. translated by massimo lollini works cited s. beckett, proust and three dialogues with georges duthuit, london 1965. r. busa s.j. 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[jcg] fondo équipe archéologie de l’asie centrale et jean-claude gardin, archivi della maison archéologie & ethnologie rené-ginouvès, nanterre. humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 57 j.-b. grize, logique mathématique, logique naturele et modèles, in formalisierung in den geisteswissenschaften / sciences humaines et formalisation, “jahresbericht der schweizerischen geisteswissenschaftlichen gesellschaft” (1974), pp. 201-207. j. haugeland, artificial intelligence: the very idea, cambridge ma 1985. d.p. henry, that most subtle question (quaestio subtilissima): the metaphysical bearing of medieval and contemporary linguistic disciplines, manchester 1984. d. hestenes, new foundations for classical mechanics (second edition), new york 2002. l. hjelmslev, prolegomena to a theory of language, madison wi 1961. l. hjelmslev, i fondamenti della teoria del linguaggio [1961], introduction and translation by g.c. lepschy, torino 1968. l. hjelmslev, language: an introduction, madison wi 1970a. l. hjelmslev, il linguaggio [1970], a cura di g.c. lepschy, transl. a. debenedetti woolf, torino 19706. j.h. holland, outline for a logical theory of adaptive systems, «journal of the acm» 9:3 (1962), pp. 297-314. s. leon, digital public history, s.d. http://www.6floors.org/dossier i personal-statement/digitalpublic-history/ [11/04/2018]. j.j. mcgann, memory now, posted on “4humanities,” 19 august 2012. https://4humanities.org/2012/08/jerome-j-mcgann-memory-now-2/ [27/04/2018]. m. merleau-ponty, la structure du comportement (1942), 6’ ed., paris 1967. m. merleau-ponty, le visible et l’invisible, paris 1964. merleau-ponty, maurice. the visible and the invisible: followed by working notes (1964). northwestern university press, 1968. p. moscati, jean-claude gardin (parigi 1925-2013): dalla meccanografia all’informatica archeologica, “archeologia e calcolatori” 24 (2013), pp. 7-24. http://www.archcalc.cnr.it/ indice/pd f24/0 l_moscati. pdf [27/04/2018]. e. nagel, review of the philosophy of science by s. toulmin, “mind” 63:251 (1954), pp. 403-412. s. noja, saggio di un confronto a mezzo di un elaboratore elettronico tra lo “šulḫan ‘arȗḵ” di karo e quello del rabbino di lubavitch, “atti della accademia delle scienze di torino” 102 (1967-68), pp. 555-582. t. orlandi, interview, in j. nyhan, a. flinn, computation and the humanities: towards an oral history of digital humanities, cham 2016. a.f. parker-rhodes, inferential semantics, hassocks 1978. j.-c. passeron, le raisonnement sociologique: l’espace non-popperien du raisonnement naturel, paris 1991. d.r. raymond, f.w. tompa, d. wood, markup reconsidered, paper presented at the first international workshop on principles of document processing, washington dc, 22-23 october 1992, pp. humanist studies & the digital age buzzetti 6.1 (2019) 58 1-25. http://citeseerx.ist. psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi= 10. l. l .80.9369&rep=rep 1 &type=pdf [09/04/2018]. d.r. raymond, f.w. tompa, d. wood, from data representation to data model: meta-semantic issues in the evolution of sgml, “computer standards and interfaces” 18 (1996), pp. 25-36. a. renear, the descriptive/procedural distinction is flawed, “markup languages” 2:4 (2000), pp. 411420. g. ryle, the concept of mind, london 1949. s. schreibman, r.g. siemens, j. unsworth ( eds.), a companion to digital humanities, malden ma 2004. g. spencer-brown, laws of form, london 1969. tarski, alfred. “grundlegung der wissenschaftlichen semantik.” in actes du congrès international de philosophie scientifique, sorbonne, paris 1935. vol. iii: language et pseudo-problèmes. hermann, paris 1936, pp. 1-8. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k383668/f5.image.r=.langfr tarski, alfred. “the concept of truth in formalized languages.” in logic, semantics, metamathematics: papers from 1923 to 1938. translated by j.h. woodger. clarendon press, 1956, pp. 152-278. text encoding initiative tei: text encoding initiative, 2016. http://www.tei-c.org/ [09/04/2018]. text encoding initiative, guidelines for electronic text encoding and interchange, 2015. http://www.tei-c.org/guidelines/ [09/04/2018]. s. e. toulmin, the philosophy of science: an introduction, london 1953. toulmin, stephen. the uses of argument (1st ed. 1958). updated ed., cambridge university press, 2003. l. truss, eats, shoots and leaves: the zero tolerance approach to punctuation, london 2003. j. unsworth, forms of attention: digital humanities beyond representation, paper delivered at “the face of text: computer-assisted text analysis in the humanities,” the third conference of the canadian symposium on text analysis (casta), mcmaster university, 19-21 november 2004. http://www.people.virginia.edu/,jmu2m/foa/ [l0/04/2018]. f. varela, e. thompson, e. rosch, the embodied mind, cambridge ma 1991. v. von weizsäcker, reflexgesetze, in a. bethe et al. (hrsg.), handbuch der normalen und pathologischen physiologie, bd. 10, berlin 1927. n. wirth, algorithms + data structures = programs, englewood cliffs n.j. 1976. l. wittgenstein, culture and value: a selection from the posthumous remains, edited by g. h. von wright in collaboration with h. nyman, revised edition of the text by a. pichler, translated by p. winch, oxford 1998. the origins of humanities computing and the digital humanities turn dino buzzetti, university of bologna 1. introduction 2. the era of the mainframes 3. a definition of humanities computing 4. representation vs. data processing 5. semantic web and digital humanities 6. the “logicism” of jean-claude gardin 7. epistemological reflection and expert systems 8. adaptive systems and methodological issues 9. ordinary language: formal model and natural computation 10. the markup: diacritical function and self-referential cycle 11. generalization of the model 12. epistemological foundations 14. conclusions works cited humanist studies & the digital age, 5.1 (2017) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.7264/n3c24tvq galileo's ariosto: the value of a mixed method approach to literary analysis crystal hall abstract using galileo galilei's saggiatore (1623) and ludovico ariosto's orlando furioso (1532) as a focal point, this article evaluates a mixed method approach for identifying matches of words and phrases that are rich material for close reading and contextualization. the method focuses on ngram matches and networks of phrases that are used together. the similarity of galileo's treatise to ariosto's poem is compared to 45 other early modern italian texts to evaluate the relative exceptionalism or normality of the findings. ngram matches reveal a series of previously unknown connections between the saggiatore and furioso, which indicate an analytical understanding of the poem, rather than borrowing of narrative or figurative expression. network analysis offers a preliminary outline for two communities of texts that frequently use the same ngrams found in the furioso. modern scholarship and the archival record agree that galileo galilei (1564-1642) was a great admirer of the late-renaissance poet ludovico ariosto (1474-1533) and his epic poem, l'orlando furioso (1516, 1521, 1532). (heilbron, 12) galileo quoted directly from the poem in several of his works, heavily annotated different editions of the work, exchanged letters on the literary debate surrounding ariosto and torquato tasso, and was reported to have nearly the entire poem memorized. since the furioso was one of the most popular books of the late-renaissance, we have to ask: was galileo's interaction with ariosto's poem unique for its time? to understand galileo's ariosto, we must also understand early modern writers' ariosto. i will argue that a mixed method approach built on quantitative and qualitative analysis brings into relief the intertextual community of which galileo was a part, but also highlights the unique ways in which he was appropriating aspects of the poem. the approach expands the horizon of what we know about the profound intertextuality dominating italian written culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. importantly, galileo's incorporation of pieces of the orlando furioso reveals elements of humanistic analysis of literature that informed his critique of arguments in natural philosophy. the first of the methods in this approach is based on the same principles as plagiarism detection: text mining for similarity between galileo's treatise on comets, il saggiatore (1623) and the expressive features of ariosto's poem by finding matching strings of alphanumeric characters (words and phrases). 1 the search for matching words and phrases goes beyond scanning for the early modern editorial cues of indentation, italicization, glossing, and marginal quotation marks that signal the presence of another author's text in a work. where early modern readers memorized texts and 1 the code used for all aspects of this article is designed to be adaptable to any corpus of italian texts. it can be found at https://research.bowdoin.edu/galileos-library/galileosariosto/code. http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ https://research.bowdoin.edu/galileos-library/galileosariosto/code humanist studies & the digital age hall 5.1 (2017) 98 ambitious twentieth-century critics created concordances of vocabulary, here i have scanned for matching words as well as two-, three-, and four-word phrases, then counted and compared results to guide subsequent close-reading and interpretation. there are more advanced approaches to be applied, but the goal here is to report on initial findings. using the 1532 ferrara edition of the orlando furioso as a point of reference, the underlying computational method for this study highlights two types of connections with the poem and galileo's saggiatore, visualized conceptually in figure 1: figure 1. a venn diagram illustrating the concept behind the computational analysis of similarities with ariosto's orlando furioso. the shaded areas are proportional to the number of phrases in each text. highlighted areas labeled "a" are the unique phrases in common between the furioso and galileo's saggiatore (a1) and between the furioso and each work in the corpus of texts studied (a2). area "b" indicates the phrases that occur in all of the three works. an examination of singular matches between texts and the furioso (a areas in figure 1) allows for a quantitative comparison of galileo's proportion of similar words or phrases and those of other authors. since 82% of the vocabulary that galileo uses is also found in the furioso, it begs the question of whether or not this similarity is relatively high for the period. to test that, i compared galileo to a corpus of 45 early modern texts that encompass poetry and prose, drama and narrative, translations and adaptations, as well as original material written by canonical and lesser-known authors. 2 2 all texts transcriptions of original editions made available electronically through the biblioteca italiana, hosted by la sapienza, università di roma and early english books online (eebo). they were chosen based on availability and because the digital text reflects the printed volume as it appeared in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, without the editorial interventions of modern scholars. see sapienza università di roma, biblioteca italiana, last modified 2013, http://www.bibliotecaitaliana.it/ accessed august 15, 2017. six italian texts are from early english books online (eebo), made available through the text creation partnership (tcp) phase i. two http://www.bibliotecaitaliana.it/ humanist studies & the digital age hall 5.1 (2017) 99 understanding the frequency of use across a corpus of texts responds to the question: to what extent were the similar words or phrases an indication of galileo's ariosto, rather than the portions of the poem that other authors frequently adopted or turns of phrase that were common throughout written materials in the period? this approach anticipates the concern that galileo was not singular in his stylistic or lexical similarity to ariosto. in fact, it quickly shows that more than 20 other texts are much more similar to the furioso than the saggiatore. these include tasso's gerualamme liberata and rinaldo, botero's ragion di stato, trissino's italia liberata dai goti, and piccolomini's istituzione dell'uomo. before looking at commonalities, it is important to note that the majority of ngrams that occur in the furioso did not match any documents in the corpus. the second method identifies words and phrases in common across multiple texts, a network analysis approach that provides a preliminary outline of communities of authors defined by which features connect their texts to the furioso. the interplay of the communal attributes with the unique aspects of galileo's connections to ariosto offers new dimensions to our understanding of that relationship. although the level of similarity between galileo's treatise on comets and the orlando furioso was not unusual (in the relatively small corpus of works presented here), the examples below support the hypothesis that galileo was part of a larger literary-linguistic family with ties to ariosto. nonetheless, he was also turning to features in the poem to which his contemporaries were not, and doing so with a witty rhetorical force for those who were able to recognize the connections. these quantitative measures point to lexical building blocks that are rich ground for the remaining methods in this approach: literary analysis and historical contextualization of the impact those features had on figurative expression in galileo's treatise. such a multi-pronged search for textual matches with this mixed methods approach has revealed previously undocumented connections between galileo's treatise and ariosto's poem, primarily at the scale of single terms and four-word phrases that are indicative of longer intertextual passages. moreover, each piece of evidence presented below should also be taken as the provocation to ask these questions for other authors in the corpus. an example will offer a rationale for the choice of words and phrases to study by means of an introduction to galileo's treatise and the terminology for describing the computational aspects of this research. galileo's primary goal in the saggiatore is to dismantle, line-by-line, the arguments presented in the latin treatise the astronomical and philosophical balance (1619), written under the pseudonym of lothario sarsi. sarsi uses the balance to critique an earlier treatise on comets, published under the name of galileo's student mario guiducci. the sections of the saggiatore follow a typical structure: copying sarsi's latin, revealing sarsi's error, and declaring sarsi's hidden motivations for critiquing galileo. for example, early in the treatise, galileo claims that sarsi's deliberate misreading of guiducci's text "ha voluto abbarbagliar la vista al lettore." (galileo, 124; translation: "he wanted to dazzle the reader's vision.")3 are there any unusual words or phrases here that would have helped a reader connect the saggiatore to other texts, or the furioso in particular? my method examines this question through four types of structures referred to generally as ngrams (sequential pieces of text composed of n units). the largest in this study is the four-word phrase, or texts were transcribed by a research assistant. a detailed list of titles used for this portion of the research can be found at: https://research.bowdoin.edu/galileos-library/galileosariosto/texts accessed august 20, 2017. 3 unless otherwise indicated, all translations from italian to english are by the author. https://research.bowdoin.edu/galileos-library/galileosariosto/texts humanist studies & the digital age hall 5.1 (2017) 100 fourgram, identified in blue in figure 2. searches for longer ngrams revealed only the lengthy direct quotations from the poem that were apparent to readers through visual cues in the text. figure 2. diagram of how fourgrams, trigrams, and bigrams are identified. bigram structure is elided to the first and final instances. in the 47 texts studied, other than the saggiatore, there are no matches to the furioso for these fourgrams or the smaller trigrams contained in this quotation, while the bigrams of ha voluto, la vista, and al lettore, are, expectedly, quite popular across nearly all texts. galileo is the only author in the corpus who uses this exact phrase. these examples also indicate the larger importance of bigrams as building blocks of expression (articulated nouns, prepositional phrases, and verb forms), while trigrams and fourgrams are combinations of those bigrams that appear in specific contexts. the interpretation of galileo's passage and its connection to ariosto relies on the final type of ngram covered in this study, a single vocabulary word, a unigram. abbarbagliare, loosely translated as “to dazzle,” is a poetic term that has roots in dante's paradiso (xxvi.20) and later petrarch's canzoniere (li.2). the term's etymology reveals the earliest theories of optics in which images emanated from an object and penetrated the eye. it is a frequent word in the orlando furioso where it is used only to describe the knight ruggiero’s magic shield that shines with a light so bright it incapacitates all who see it. importantly, this magic shield is only used on monsters in the poem, and it is considered unchivalrous to use it against other knights. in fact, when ruggiero accidentally reveals the shield to his companions, he casts it into a lake so that it can never disgrace him again. i would argue that galileo is absolutely using the term with this chivalric connotation in his suggestion that sarsi is trying to rhetorically stun readers so that they cannot see the erroneous philosophical logic that lies behind his words. in the collection of sixteenth and seventeenth century italian texts used for this study, which represent a range of genres, this verb only appears in five other works: the rewriting of the canzoniere, petrarca spirituale (1536) by girolamo malipiero; the ferrarese giraldi cinzio's fiamme (1548); an italian translation of ovid's metamorphoses (1563); humanist studies & the digital age hall 5.1 (2017) 101 ferrarese-educated cardinal silvio antoniano's educatione cristiana (1584); and francesco peretto's odes, gli occhi (1616). none of these works use the term in the moralizing way that ariosto employed it in the furioso. in a work that is almost entirely about how to see and understand comets, galileo uses a poetic term about sight, based on an interpretative (not just narrative) reading of the poem, in order to describe rhetorical and argumentative strategies. closer examination of the unique and low-frequency unigram matches between the furioso and saggiatore reveal galileo's humanistic mastery of ariosto's poem. we can take, for instance, galileo's use of the word ramarichi, a hapax legomenon in the treatise that occurs three times in ariosto's poem. while the term does not appear in the works currently available in plain text original editions used for this study, it is relatively frequent in early sixteenth-century works, including other works by ariosto, pietro bembo, and pietro aretino. galileo uses his literary understanding of the term to undermine an argument about authorities in natural philosophy that sarsi had made in the balance. sarsi had suggested (in latin) that galileo unnecessarily criticized his use of tycho brahe as an authority by vainly invoking a line from seneca, in order to "deplore the misfortune of this age." (sarsi, 71) in the earlier treatise by galileo's student, mario guiducci had referred to seneca's advice to suspend judgement on two competing truths pending more precise knowledge of the shape and structure of the universe. (guiducci, 57) given the edict of 1615, banning support of copernicanism, galileo finds himself in a seemingly impossible situation in which he cannot support copernicus, the evidence refutes ptolemy, and the leading authority, brahe, is null (according to galileo). he defends the reference to seneca with the following line in the saggiatore: "non però tra ramarichi e lagrime deploro, come scrive il sarsi, la miseria e la calamità di questo secolo" (galileo, 120; translation: "not, however, through sorrows and tears do i deplore, as sarsi writes, the troubles and calamity of this age.") galileo adds the details of "tra ramarichi e lagrime" to complete the hendecasyllable presentation of his refutation and he goes on to say that, since he is powerless to change the situation, his "querele" ("complaints") are not in vain (using variants of the word three times). these contextual terms add clues to the passage's connection with the furioso: canto xxxviii, in which bradamante agonizes over the two tragic outcomes possible from the announced battle to the death between her destined husband ruggiero (fighting for the african king) and her brother rinaldo (fighting for charlemagne) in order to determine the ultimate victor of the war. while bradamante searches for a third solution, ariosto describes her physical and emotional suffering: "chiama con ramarichi e querele / ruggiero ingrato, e il suo destin crudele." (ariosto, 38.70.7-8; translation: "with sorrows and complaints she calls / ruggiero ungrateful and her destiny cruel.") bradamante is spared the loss of either her brother or future husband by the intervention of the sorceress melissa. galileo has no other recourse than seneca, skillfully contextualized through unigrams within the complexities and emotive power of his favorite poem. turning to critical analysis via close reading supplements the quantitative approach that identifies all ngram matches, yet it would be erroneous to call matches to ha voluto or la vista (the bigrams in figure 1) stylistic borrowing or intentional intertextuality. in this case, a second quantitative method can add insight that close reading cannot. any similarities revealed by phrases such as ha voluto are suggestive of sounds and styles, and also subject matter, that run throughout the corpus. the quantitative approach reinforces the uniqueness of each text, while providing an opportunity to dive deeply into these similarities. moreover, the ngrams that match ariosto's poem are found primarily in one or two texts. while the 82% vocabulary similarity between the saggiatore and the furioso means that over 40% of galileo's text is composed of a word used in ariosto's poem, humanist studies & the digital age hall 5.1 (2017) 102 the average overall textual similarity between any text and the furioso was 15%. those percentages decrease dramatically as length of the ngram increases, to 0.1% for fourgrams. in addition, more than 75% of the fourgrams were used in only one or two texts other than the furioso, so they have been excluded from the figures below in order to focus on the well-defined lexical families. in the case of bigrams, without filtering out these low frequency phrases, there would be nearly 26 million connections between over 100,000 phrases to visualize. in future research, these low-frequency and unique ngrams could point to site of meaningful connections between texts, much in the same way the unigram matches did. here, those loosely connected phrases would distract from the core question, and the more prominent aspect of the network: which phrases are most commonly used with one another and which authors are using them? by visualizing these ngrams as a network of phrases commonly used together in texts, we can identify common lexical or stylistic patterns. this is not a claim about intentional authorial sampling, but instead a way to probe the contours of genre and expression. network analysis provides a means to identifying these communities mathematically by looking for groups of texts that share more ngrams between each other than they do with the rest of the corpus. visualization of these quantitative attributes can highlight patterns that exist in the connections between phrases frequently used together in texts. this method offers layouts that emphasize these communities, color-coding of highly-connected groups of phrases, and filters that show the network of phrases used by each author. figure 3a offers the example of the network of fourgrams that occur in at least three texts and the 1532 edition of the orlando furioso. a fully interactive version of this graph is available online for exploration.4 there are five communities of highly connected fourgrams in this network, most predominately the group in blue that is a cluster of general purpose expressions containing terms about objects in the world (gente, terra, ciel, parte), opposite the brown community that uses abstract descriptors (cose, poco, altro, tempo). close reading of the other clusters reveals a divide within the expressions of war that pervade the furioso. most distinct are the two groups that feature physical terms related to conflict (morte, sangue, spada, arme) and emotional terms related to conflict (odio, ira, sdegno), in green and red, respectively. we expect phrases on these topics in works with similar plots or themes as the furioso. the purple community will be discussed with figure 3b. 4 link available through the supplemental site: https://research.bowdoin.edu/galileoslibrary/galileosariosto accessed august 31, 2017. https://research.bowdoin.edu/galileos-library/galileosariosto https://research.bowdoin.edu/galileos-library/galileosariosto humanist studies & the digital age hall 5.1 (2017) 103 figure 3a. a network diagram made with gephi 0.9.1. nodes (circles) represent four-word phrases found in the orlando furioso and used by other authors: their color indicates their community as determined by gephi's louvain modularity algorithm, their size is constant (no symbolic significance). edges (lines) represent that two phrases are found in the same text: thickness of the line indicates the relative number of those phrases. only edges that occur three or more times are shown. layout created with force atlas algorithm and expansion. what network analysis helps to identify are texts that are predominantly composed from one cluster or another. by applying a filter to focus on the phrases used by a particular author, we see the communities in which that text participates. for example, figure 3b compares the fourgrams that only galileo, torquato tasso, and giambattista giraldi cinzio use, respectively, highlighting the different ways in which these authors' texts share similarities with ariosto's poem. humanist studies & the digital age hall 5.1 (2017) 104 figure 3b. subsets of network diagram figure 3a made with the same settings. nodes (circles) represent four-word phrases found in the orlando furioso and used by tasso in the gerusalemme liberata (left), giraldi cinzio in the ercole (center), and galileo in the saggiatore (right). only edges that occur three or more times are shown. the comparison of the authors' networks emphasizes the physical combat (green) in the gerusalemme liberata and the non-bellicose (blue) ways the saggiatore are each similar to the furioso. tasso's preference for the abstract would also seem to be suggested by the absence of fourgrams that incorporate terms related to objects (the blue nodes). cinzio's encomiastic heroic poem ercole (figure 3b, center), narrates the feats of ercole ii, duke of ferrara, notably with significant overlap with the fourgrams in tasso's poem that match the furioso (emotions of conflict, red), yet also certain omissions (physical combat, green). in cinzio's subnetwork, the puple fourgram community, absent in tasso, represents fourgrams used frequently with phrases in the other communities, with significant overlap in key terms: ira, parte, altro. seeing these comparisons raises the question: which texts are using similar phrases? to answer that question, the overlap between the furioso and two other texts (the matches in the "b" area in figure 1) can be organized as a network of texts connected by their common use of an ngram. in this way, we can see communities of authors who use similar ngrams. such a rephrasing of the question can offer insight about the ways in which literary or biographical features such as period, geography, or notoriety of an author could be related to usage patterns. although the analysis can include unigrams, single words would tend to reveal topical communities on comets, swords, love, etc. and topic modeling would be a more appropriate tool for examining these relationships. on the other hand, the communities that use similar phrasing are consistent for bigrams, trigrams, and fourgrams; trigrams are represented below. labels are present for the ten texts that have the highest number of trigrams in common with orlando furioso, sized relative to that number. the five most peripheral nodes (texts) are the only ones not connected to every other work in the entire corpus. humanist studies & the digital age hall 5.1 (2017) 105 figure 4. a network diagram made with gephi 0.9.1. nodes (circles) represent texts: their size indicates the number of trigrams the text has in common with the orlando furioso that no other work in the corpus shares with that poem, their color indicates their community as determined by gephi's louvain modularity algorithm. edges (lines) represent that two texts use the same trigram found in the orlando furioso: thickness of the line indicates is relative to the number of those common trigrams, filtered for edges the occur more than 4 times. layout created with force atlas algorithm on default settings and adjusted manually for legibility of labels. labels provide short titles for the 10 texts with the highest number of overall trigrams in common with the furioso. as mentioned before, the early modern texts studied here only have small percentages in common with ariosto's poem, but figure 4 confirms that what they do share with orlando furioso, they share with each other. this is the tip of a larger research question about intertextuality and style in the early modern period. there are no clear genre lines dividing the two groups, nor are they chronologically or geographically distinct. galileo consistently appears with the same authors mentioned earlier for their use of abbarbagliare: alessandro piccolomini, cardinal silvio antoniano, and giovanni botero. while ultimately confirming that in terms of quantity and commonalities, galileo's similarity to ariosto was not exceptional, these results outline a method for exploring the relationship between ariosto, cinzio, tasso, and other authors of epic in future studies. humanist studies & the digital age hall 5.1 (2017) 106 at the same time, the approach also highlights unique aspects of texts' relationships with the orlando furioso. given that the vast majority of matches with the poem only occur in one text, what are the singular similarities identified through computation? this again pushes the investigation towards the aspects of galileo's texts that are not captured by network analysis, but through automated searching for matches, the a1 area in figure 2. as expected, when combined with close reading, the fourgram searches provided clues to larger moments of intertextuality, particularly through the phrases that only occur once in the corpus, and are otherwise excluded from the networks above. even here, computationally scanning for matching text can only provide limited information about any expressive importance between the similarities. while the four words themselves might carry little communicative weight, they are unique enough to point to passages from which galileo was likely borrowing as he composed his rebuttal to sarsi's critique. the mixed methods allow us to see the context in which galileo's singular sampling of ariosto occurs and to bring to light evidence of his humanistic skills of literary analysis in a work of natural philosophy. for example, one of the fourgrams in common between galileo's text and ariosto's poem is the seemingly innocuous phrase "al primo motto che" ("as soon as" or more literally "at the first word that"), used only once in each text, and not present in any other text in the corpus. early in the saggiatore galileo begins his routine of defending his earlier statements about comets by descending into hypothetical constructions of the delight he would take in being victorious over a multitude of enemies (his term) who claim that the comet in question must be very far from earth since viewing it through the telescope produces a negligible change in its apparent size. in spite of the reports coming from all corners of europe to support such an argument, galileo says (with my emphasis added): "io al primo motto, che di ciò intesi, molto chiaramente mi lasciai intendere che stimavo questo argomento vanissimo" (galileo, 113; translation: "at the first word, that i understood of it, i let myself be understood very clearly, that i held that argument most vain.") ariosto uses the phrase in a similar situation of conflict when ruggiero is called crazy and a liar by an enemy for believing (correctly) that his shield is his rightful property (with my emphasis added): "come ben riscaldato àrrido legno / a piccol soffio subito s'accende, / così s'avampa di ruggier lo sdegno / al primo motto che di questo intende." (ariosto, 26.103.1-4; translation: "as well heated dry wood / at a tiny whiff of air immediately ignites, / so too ruggiero's anger blazed up / at the first word that he understands of it.") the fourgram match is an indication of an entire verse from the furioso, highlighted by the similar phrases that are underlined. galileo's can now be read not just as acting quickly to declare his position, but as an impassioned defender of what he knows to be the truth. similarly, the phrase "a tutta la sua" ("and all of his/her/its") is a unique match in galileo's text and ariosto's that points to a longer passage of meaningful intertextuality masked by slight grammatical alterations. in the saggiatore, the phrase appears in the context of a rhetorical question to sarsi (with my emphasis added): "ma perché non perdona egli questo assunto al signor mario, ed ad aristotile sì ed a tutta la sua setta...?" (galileo, 204; translation: "but why does he not pardon this assumption for sig. mario, as well as for aristotle and for all his faction...?") in ariosto, this appears in an excerpt from the princess olimpia's narration of her sowerful plight: "io per l'odio non sì, che grave porto / a lui e a tutta la sua iniqua schiatta, / il qual m'ha dui fratelli e 'l padre morto, / saccheggiata la patria, arsa e disfatta." (ariosto, 9.33.1-4; translation: "not so much by hate, which i bear, grievous, / for him and for all of his wicked stock / that killed my two brothers and father, / sacked, burned, and destroyed my fatherland.") decorum would have meant that iniqua schiatta was quite inappropriate for the treatise, but setta allows for the allusion without implying the same rage or judgment. without taking the further step of close reading and contextualizing the results of text humanist studies & the digital age hall 5.1 (2017) 107 mining, this intertextual connection risks being dismissed as simply common use of the quotidian phrase a tutta la sua. a final example reinforces the rich connections between texts that could be suggested by fourgrams that lack content-bearing terms such as schiatta, intende, abbarbagliare, or ramarichi. when disputing the fact that the telescope could be called the same instrument when applied differently, galileo writes (with my emphasis added): "vi è, s'io non m'inganno, un poco di equivoco" ("there is, if i am not mistaken, a bit of a misunderstanding"). (galileo, 171.) like the use of abbarbagliare, this connection to the furioso relies on literary analysis, here an understanding of the voice of the poet, a more sophisticated incorporation than just a topical or emotional turn of phrase to make galileo's point. ariosto expresses something similar when describing astolfo's travels in africa. in a statement to the reader about the presence of the fabled prester john in ethiopia, ariosto writes (again with my added emphasis): "gli è, s'io non piglio errore, in questo loco / ove al battesmo loro usano il fuoco." (ariosto, 33.102.7-8; translation: "he is, if i am not mistaken, in this place / where at baptisms they use fire.") using overt declarations of authority such as this, the poet in orlando furioso frequently winks at readers to signal what albert ascoli has called "lies with a lying face" that are obvious for their dubious status as truth. (ascoli, 254) the phrase "if i am not mistaken" creates an opportunity to evaluate the validity of the statement, but in the jocose spirit of ariosto's poem, or the witty rhetorical display of the saggiatore, the reader should be on guard. galileo capitalizes on this mechanism's power to deflect authority onto the reader, making the criticism against sarsi all the harsher for the transparency of his error to likely nonspecialists. the implication is that there is no misunderstanding; sarsi is wrong once again. while text mining alone would suggest only a commonly used phrase, and the lexical networks would have missed this unique rhetorical sleight of hand, the contextualization within the longer passage and the literary devices of ariosto's poem bring to the fore galileo's use of humanistic knowledge to strengthen his critique of a natural philosophical argument. by identifying these unique connections, we also know who was not adopting these phrases to describe quick action, cast doubt, complain, or criticize. the computational approach applied here contextualizes philological work within the expressive trends of the time, in a way that will grow as the project develops. although the networks, text mining, literary analysis, historical contextualization, and interpretation of galileo's humanistic methods reveal a considerable common linguistic ground between two communities of authors, the unique and singular matches found in galileo bring into relief the kinds of intertextuality operating in early modern italian texts. beyond quotations and sampling, turns of phrase connect texts at different levels with different consequences for the reader who can recognize them. the by-products of following this one, rather elementary, line of computational inquiry are many. understanding galileo's ariosto has also required a preliminary outline of 45 other versions of the intertextual ariosto operating in early modern italian written culture. now there is a baseline to evaluate the depth of literary analysis with which those other authors gestured toward the furioso or other works. these are 45 areas of research that will likely lead to other fruitful connections between this renaissance masterpiece and the expressive goals of the writers who followed after him. works cited humanist studies & the digital age hall 5.1 (2017) 108 albert russell ascoli, ariosto's bitter harmony: crisis and evasion in the renaissance. princeton: princeton university press, 2014. print. ariosto, ludovico. l'orlando furioso, ed. lanfranco caretti. 2 vols. turin: einaudi, 1992. galilei, galileo. il saggiatore, eds. ottavio besomi and mario helbing. rome: antenore, 2005. print. guiducci, mario. discourse on the comets, trans. and ed. stillman drake and c.d. o'malley. in the controversy on the comets of 1618. 21-66. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 1960. print. heilbron, j. l. galileo. oxford: oxford university press, 2010. print. sarsi, lothario (pseud. ottavio grassi). the astronomical and philosophical balance, trans. and ed. stillman drake and c.d. o'malley. in the controversy on the comets of 1618. 67-132. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 1960. print. change of paradigm: from individual to community-based scholarship massimo riva abstract: the change of paradigm we are witnessing involves not only the transformation of the procedures of scholarly research and learning but also and more importantly the transformation of its goals. the scholarly work is being increasingly made over into a collective, collaborative, large-scale enterprise characterized by the move from discursive to graphic-algorithmic forms of data presentation and interpretation. this change has eventful consequences for critical thinking: as humanists engaged with a potentially radical transformation of the community we belong to, our most daunting task is how to transpose traditional scholarly practices onto the new platform, envisioning new goals and outputs for our traditional tasks. let me clarify, first of all that my title does not refer to the application of knowledge through faculty engagement in community-based research, teaching and service -something that is usually understood as "community-engaged scholarship." the change of paradigm i refer to, instead, is of a cognitive kind and should be understood within a broader framework: namely, the general transformation of our participatory or convergence culture in the age of social and "spreadable" media (to use a terminology made current by richard jenkins). of course, as the web 2.0 evolves toward the web 3.0 or the semantic web, community-engaged scholarship will be one of the most crucial components of this larger and more pervasive phenomenon. what is at stake is not only the transformation of the procedures of scholarly research but also and more importantly the transformation of its goals: traditionally based (at least in the humanities) on the individual researcher and author, knowledge work, or the scholarly mode of production, is increasingly transformed into a collective, collaborative enterprise. however, this collectivization or socialization of research is based on different models of what we mean by "collaboration." and this is what i'd like to address here, very briefly. digital technologies do promote the implementation of collaborative, distributed or networked research practices and outputs: however, these dramatically differ from each other in methodologies and goals. to give you only one example: data mining in the humanities can be defined as a collective enterprise not only because it relies upon the input of cohorts, or even generations, of scholars, but also because it shifts the traditional goals of humanistic research toward a "collective" output, embodied in data aggregations or disaggregations which often defy more traditional, individualistic methods of analysis. the same could be said (and i would have developed this aspect in my presentation in the other panel) of geo-parsing methodologies which connect (or superimpose) geographical and historical, cultural or textual data onto each other, as exemplified by geo-archaeological studies or even literary studies which make use of geographic information retrieval techniques (mapping literary corpora such as, for example, the history of the novel, or other literary genres, according to their geographical distribution in time, for example). of course, individual scholars can still give their individual contribution to corpus linguistics or contribute to the geoparsing and/or timelining of data by running if not composing an algorithm; and they can base their individual analysis on the collective-automatized input. in either case, however, individual contribution is neither the determining factor nor the most representative output. it is not only the focus but also the ethos of scholarship to shift with the widespread application of these new techniques. the general move from discursive to graphic-algorithmic forms of data visualization and interpretation (including textual data), for example, has eventful consequences for critical thinking. in a sense, we are witnessing today a return to the age of positivism. in short, what is changing is the way we make sense (in the literal sense of the words). raw data can only make sense to us if we make them... i will give you only one example, which has to do with the scale of things: in the age of big data, the humanities, too, feel compelled to increase the scale of their objects of study. both massimo lollini and i have focused our projects on individual works (boccaccio's decameron and petrarca's canzoniere) as well as their legacy or afterlife in translation, etc. of course, these are strategic works, so to speak, as they occupy a crucial position in the history of literature (not limited to the italian) and the history of their respective genres. yet, our approach is becoming increasingly counterintuitive as the tools at our disposal become ever more powerful. powerful computation applied to small scale phenomena seems, and perhaps is, a waste. mathematical or algorithmic patterns applied to a singularity are absurd. this change of scale is even more daunting when we move from textual phenomena to visualization in general: according to the international data corporation (idc) already by 2010 we produced approximately 500 billion digital images through approximately a billion devices, and this number does not include video data generated by surveillance or for scientific use. faced with this mindboggling capacity to produce data about everything, everywhere and always, the fundamental question is clearly which data are important and worth analyzing? on the one hand, our sensors (data gathering mechanisms) will have to become more intelligent and selective; on the other hand, we will have to develop powerful analytical tools, analytics on a scale equivalent to the exponential increase of raw data. now, can we entrust this crucial task only to automatic, pre-programmed devices? a somewhat alternative model is offered by the new collaborative forms made possible by interconnectivity on a massive scale. for example, mass-tagging, the collective production of hyper-glosses or hyper-annotations capable to create a meta-data compact which combines individual opinions and computational procedures and can be mined by either humans or programs. now, are this and other forms of scholarly crowdsourcing a powerful drive toward a socialization and democratization of research? not necessarily, although they could be. for instance, instead of entrusting the parsing of all the rhetorical figures used by dickens in his novels or by shakespeare, dante, petrarch and boccaccio in their works, a different approach could leverage the contribution of readers willing to tag and annotate texts through a specifically designed interface.... this method seems more suited for humanistic data mining because it is a form of community-based research; indeed, it may contribute to the expansion of the community of proactive readers of literary works, and the scholarly and learning community as well. think for example of the possibility of comparing multi-tagging results from different geographic and cultural or linguistic areas over time... reader-response criticism could indeed be revolutionized. the question is: which of these two methods (the one based on algorithms and the one based on more or less massive crowdsourcing and folksonomies) is more reliable? perhaps the answer is: neither, taken alone, but matters could become interesting if we find a way of intelligently combining web 2.0 type participatory and collaborative practices with web 3.0 semantic tools within a scholarly framework. in conclusion, i gave only one example of the kind of critical thinking we will have to increasingly apply as humanists engaged with a potentially radical transformation of the community we belong to: our most daunting task is how to transpose traditional scholarly practices onto the new platform. one thing is certain, knowledge is not structured as a tree or a list any more, but as a graph. and isn't mass linking what scholars have always done with different means? perhaps it is time to start building what paolo d'iorio and michele barbera envision: a scholarly resource (they call it scholarsource) aimed to reproduce the old game of humanities research on the digital platform, which would allow us to navigate the information tsunami by following the relations of meaning which scholars and researchers themselves have introduced in the flux through a collaborative metadata apparatus (primary and secondary sources, annotations, etc.), instead of entrusting our luck every day to the anonymous albeit creative engineers of google & co.... works cited d'iorio, paolo, & barbera, michele. scholarsource: a digital infrastructure for the humanities. in thomas bartscherer (ed.), switching codes. chicago: chicago university press. 61-88. this article is a transcription of a video presentation for the 2013 american association of italian studies annual meeting held in eugene, oregon. the video is embedded below and available via these links: low bandwidth high bandwidth humanist studies & the digital age, 5.1 (2017) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.7264/n3gt5kk4 geospatial visualizations for the study of boccaccio michael papio abstract this essay asks a very general question: what can mapmaking do to help us better understand the life and work of a medieval author such as boccaccio? this question relates to papio’s own engagement with boccaccio’s work as a “geographer” and “topographer” in de montibus, and draws on pedagogical practices recently developed within the framework of the oldest among the vhl projects, the decameron web, that papio contributed to create, back in the late 1990s. what can mapmaking do to help us better understand the life and work of giovanni boccaccio?1 the short answer is that we cannot know until we do it. a fuller response would begin with a look at what analogous work has been done and then move on to some introductory experimentation. this, in short, is the purpose of this brief essay. we shall open this analysis with a sort of interpretive framework, one that establishes at least in broad strokes the approach that will be of use to us. the field of geocriticism has emerged from the basic idea, which is nothing new to medievalists, that the study of literature may be enriched by methodologies traditionally used in other disciplines, especially in the social sciences. in geocriticism, literary theorists use tools related to the study of geographic space to investigate literature.2 as usually happens in the early years of new theories, some proponents of geocriticism have vigorously sought to provoke reactions, and these reactions tend to range from stubborn antagonism to wholehearted discipleship. one interesting example of intellectual provocation may be found on the back dustjacket of franco moretti’s 2005 study entitled graphs, maps, trees. there we read: franco moretti argues heretically that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. he insists that such a move 1 everything useful in this essay comes from work done by albert lloret and myself on our critical edition of the de montibus, which has been generously sponsored by the national endowment of the humanities. all translations not attributed to others are my own. 2 the bibliography of this burgeoning field is in a fervidly productive period. for the general outlines, see tally, westphal (géocritique). westphal (le ravage) presents a series of ideas that are specifically thought-provoking in relation to the present essay. http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ humanist studies & the digital age papio 5.1 (2017) 25 could bring new lustre to a tired field, one that in some respects is among “the most backward disciplines in the academy.” in the light of moretti’s actual use of maps inside the book, however, it is clear that the blurb on the outside was likely stuck on by the marketing department. there is quite a lot of utility in his approach here, and perhaps even more in his earlier study of the european novel (atlas), which presents roughly one hundred visual representations of space in a variety of a literary works. among some of the most fascinating are geographical relationships in “jane austen’s britain,” the curious distribution of the settings of “british gothic tales” across the map of europe, and a map that portrays the paths of manzoni’s lucia and renzo across a countryside that, as we can see at a glance, was enclosed in the triangle formed by milan, bergamo, and the castle of the innominato. far from a substitute for the time-tested avenue of literary studies, at least in my opinion, these new views serve to complement them, to enhance our understanding of what we were reading before we were told to stop. in his introduction, he makes a statement that is as helpful as it is unprovocative: [g]eography is not an inert container, is not a box where cultural history “happens,” but an active force, that pervades the literary field and shapes it in depth. making the connection between geography and literature explicit, then – mapping it: because a map is precisely that, a connection made visible – will allow us to see some significant relationships that have so far escaped us. (moretti atlas, 3) in this same spirit, we hypothesize here that geospatial representations of boccaccio’s world – a few pages taken from an unfinished boccaccio atlas, so to speak – may similarly provide insights into additional things that had escaped our notice. before charging right in, though, it is prudent to define a bit more explicitly which parts of boccaccio’s work will be put into sharper focus. ultimately, we are interested in the way that he conceives of spaces, from oceans and large regions to towns and even small hills, particularly those he does not know firsthand, and what these conceptions can subsequently tell us. but this enormous mosaic can be made only a few tiles at a time. although he did not travel as widely as petrarch, boccaccio’s geographical knowledge was far better than that of the vast majority of his coevals. nevertheless, his firsthand acquaintance with locations and topographical features was perforce limited. the distance and speed of overland travel depended on a variety of factors, including not only the mode of transportation (e.g., walking, on horseback, with a 2or 4-wheeled cart, alone or with others, and so on), but also the conditions and the terrain (e.g., good or bad weather, solid or muddy roads, ascents and descents, the width of the track, bridges and ferries). what is more, we know that boccaccio was a rather robust man and, if we believe petrarch (sen. 5.1), was not especially well suited to long journeys. he probably lived his entire life in a geographic area bounded by the extremes of avignon in the west, venice in the north and calabria in the south. all other locations that appear in his works were known to him through the words of authors and acquaintances. this simple observation, combined with a map, already tells us something that might have escaped our notice. in figure 1, you will find a section of a cluster map that illustrates places mentioned by boccaccio in his masterpiece. two aspects jump out immediately: first, the decameron is tightly moored to those areas its author knew from actual experience; second, those places he had only heard or read about are still surprisingly present. the ramifications of such data, to use a rather impersonal term, are limited only by the scholar who considers them. for instance, one may be tempted to take another look at boccaccio’s realism, a topic that has generated no small number of studies already. in a comparable way, his contacts with other mediterranean cultures and realities different from his own could easily be addressed against a representational backdrop such as this. humanist studies & the digital age papio 5.1 (2017) 26 figure 1 as we increase the granularity of the data, even more potentially suggestive ideas come to mind. figure 2 shows that, in addition to being an italian collection of tales, the decameron is substantially tuscan (which will come as a shock to no one), but with a very meaningful presence of the mezzogiorno that is by no means limited to sites he visited during his neapolitan years. lying beyond those areas are many others, plus cities and islands, fortresses, ports and rivers. each of these comes with its own ambience, characteristics and history (real or imaginary). humanist studies & the digital age papio 5.1 (2017) 27 figure 2 moving to the level of florence’s centro storico (fig. 3), one sees the distribution of specific named places in the text as dots spread with apparent homogeneity and impartiality across the landmarks you probably already recognize from tourist maps (alongside the number 72, which represents occurrences of the word firenze). upon closer inspection, however, this distribution may in reality tell us something different. consider the shaded area of the oltrarno, which represents the neighborhood of boccaccio himself and of those with whom he had the closest relationships in 1352.3 now these dots take on a different feel; in a collection of tales that seem to have been kept generally close to geographical areas known personally by their author, never is there mention of that handful of city blocks he knew as his own. like all new connections, whether or not these mean anything depends on the person who makes them. our understanding of the world of the decameron has at any rate been enhanced, even if only in the addition of one new “tile,” by the use of a decidedly uncomplicated tool of geospatial representation. this first experiment demonstrates plainly that a map, like an alphabetical index or a concordance, can provide an alluring new way to approach an author, a text or a corpus. unlike other paratexts, though, maps offer a system of coordinates upon which we can plot not only textual elements, but also our own realities. for instance, if you looked at figure 3 and imagined places in florence where you have been, you effectively plotted your own experiences alongside some others that belong to the decameron’s characters and author. one may furthermore set any other dataset upon this one and create new connections. it would be interesting, for example, to mark the position where dante’s house once stood or that of the badia (only a few steps away) where boccaccio presented his esposizioni. most anything is possible provided that the plotted locations remain verifiable.4 3 see porta casucci 194. 4 obviously, one may also make maps of imaginary spaces, though that is not our primary concern here. humanist studies & the digital age papio 5.1 (2017) 28 figure 3 much more could be said about this text in particular, but the present essay is intended above all to provide a broad overview of the benefits of geocriticism in the study of boccaccio. in fact, now that we have used the adjective “verifiable” in relation to physical space, we must take a step back to consider certain limitations of that term before proceeding to our next experiment. useful in this regard is an observation made by betrand westphal, currently one of the leading practitioners of geocriticism: in the middle ages […] the hierarchy of places that […] authorities competed to establish is unstable. it evolves in function of the place of each one and the others in the canon of the moment. the projection in the real or imaginary space is a good tributary way to measure the reception that is accorded to the texts and their authors. time establishes the classics, and without doubt it is time that designated masterpieces. in any case, time activates the trends and enables openings. as for the cleavage between the real and the imaginary, it covers only a limited reach. the trip is often too mental for the reference to reality to be objective and for the places to be dependable. it is the text that ensures the link between the prestigious past and the irresolute present.5 5 westphal plausible, 19. in the original: “au moyen âge […] la hiérarchie des lieux que ces autorités concourent à établir est instable. elle évolue en fonction de la place des uns et des autres dans le canon du moment. la projection dans l’espace réel ou imaginaire est dans une bonne mesure tributaire de la réception que l’on accorde aux textes et à leurs auteurs. le temps fait son œuvre. sans doute est-ce lui qui fait les chefs-d’œuvre. il active en tout cas les modes et humanist studies & the digital age papio 5.1 (2017) 29 the unstable medieval hierarchy of places was greatly dependent upon the exigencies of those who sought to establish it, just as the selection of such places was conditioned by an interpretive framework that created meaning from a canon, the most obvious of which included the bible itself and, secondarily, related geographical portions of texts such as orosius’ historiae adversus paganos and isidore’s etymologiae. in other words, the primary geographical canon comprised locations that were important to an accurate understanding of the most culturally and spiritually important narrative of them all: holy scripture. now, just as medieval thinkers regularly imagined a sort of anagogical moebius strip that united the two parts of the christian bible into a single narrative despite obvious ontological discrepancies, medieval enthusiasts of geography tended to fuse locations together without much regard for temporal instability. heraclitus’ adage that you cannot step into the same river twice is just as true for any other geographical feature. quite simply put, the egypt of the pharaohs is not the same as the egypt into which mary and joseph fled when herod began killing infants. nevertheless, the mental trip to this “prestigious past” was as irresistible as it was essential. moreover, it is not only the hierarchy of geography that is unstable; precisely because of the changes wrought by time, even the locations themselves are unstable entities. the idea that geographical locations were unstable may seem to us, who have google maps in our phones and a gps in our cars, to be a curious concept. indeed, we have become so comfortable with cartography and coordinates that even looking at a map not presented with north toward its topmost edge (as on the emblem of the united nations) can be mildly disorienting. of course, these are all skills and conventions born from cartography, a science that was still in its infancy in the middle ages and accessible to a very small percentage of the population.6 the fourteenth century was a time in which cartography comfortably comprised at least three main representational tools.7 symbolic mappaemundi based on the t-o type, portolan charts, and what we may describe as accuracy-driven maps coexisted (frequently indifferent to one another) throughout all of boccaccio’s lifetime. each of these gave geospatial information within its own context and for a specific audience. hence, returning to our previous example, egypt’s representation on each of these types of maps obviously varied. the instability of geolocations across time and space is an especially productive notion for boccaccio studies for two principal reasons. first, as we have already noticed, he must necessarily have had only an approximate conception of those places where he had never been. indeed, his ménage les ouvertures. quant au clivage entre le réel et l’imaginaire, il ne recouvre qu’une portée limitée. le voyage est trop souvent mental pour que la référence à la réalité objective des lieux soit fiable. c’est le texte qui assure le relais entre le passé prestigieux et un présent irrésolu” (monde, 51-52). 6 before we get too smug in the assessment of our modern capacity for understanding the meaning of maps, we should pause to consider some of the results of the national geographic-roper public affairs 2006 geographic literacy study: 88% of young americans then aged 18-24 were unable to locate afghanistan on a map; 70% could not find north korea; 50% could not find the state of new york; 38% consider speaking another language to be “not too important”; 21% say it is “not too important” to know where countries in the news are located. 7 in order not to overburden this essay, we shall limit our bibliographical references related to late antiquity and the middle ages to a representative few. see harley and woodward, lelewel, almagià, merrills. humanist studies & the digital age papio 5.1 (2017) 30 generation had nothing but these disparate drawings and maps to help them visualize the landscapes that were so important to them. second, he was intensely concerned not merely with contemporary geography but also – and perhaps especially – with locations that had been mentioned or described in ancient literature. this lack of fixedness could be assessed in both geographic and temporal terms. mount helicon, for example, was undeniably far away in boeotia but its location as the home of the muses was inaccessibly distant in the mythical past. any voyage there was logically mental in nature. we can get an idea of what this meant by recalling the words of cassiodorus to his monastic brothers: i also encourage you, not without good reason, to consider the information of the cosmographers, for you must definitely know each place mentioned in the holy books you read and in which part of the world it is located. this is something you will clearly manage to do if you read, carefully and without delay, the little book of julius the orator i left for you. in his four-part treatise, he speaks so fully of seas, islands, famous mountains, provinces, cities, rivers and peoples that his work contains almost all information pertaining to the study of cosmography. […] then study dionysius’ map, which is easily comprehended, so that you may carefully observe with your own eyes what you had heard about with your ears in the aforementioned book. then, should some bit of important information stir your mind, you have ptolemy’s codex, which so clearly shows each place that you would practically think he had lived in every region. then, though you may remain in one place, as is appropriate for monks, you shall contemplate in your mind what others have acquired during laborious travels.8 these sage words of advice were penned in the sixth century, but the geo-literary experience they suggest is timeless. a devout soul in his cell who searches a map in eager anticipation to find jerusalem and the river jordan is quite comparable to a modern scholar who enthusiastically plots places mentioned in the decameron. in both cases, maps aid in the discovery of elements that, as moretti explained, would otherwise remain elusive. thus far, we have considered the benefits of using maps to reconstruct a literary reality, even one distorted by time, which existed hundreds of years ago. we are intrigued by a new window on the middle ages, just as the monks at cassiodorus’ vivarium were fascinated by imagining the places mentioned in the bible. now we may usefully complicate this dynamic a bit by establishing a third 8 institutiones 1.25.1-2: “cosmographiae quoque notitiam vobis percurrendam esse non immerito suademus, ut loca singula, quae in libris sanctis legitis, in qua parte mundi sint posita evidenter cognoscere debeatis. quod vobis proveniet absolute, si libellum iulii oratoris, quem vobis reliqui, studiose legere festinetis; qui maria, insulas, montes famosos, provincias, civitates, flumina, gentes ita quadrifaria distinctione complexus est, ut paene nihil libro ipsi desit, quod ad cosmographiae notitiam cognoscitur pertinere. […] deinde penacem dionisii discite breviter comprehensum, ut quod auribus in supradicto libro percipitis, paene oculis intuentibus videre possitis. tum si vos notitiae nobilis cura flammaverit, habetis ptolomei codicem, qui sic omnia loca evidenter expressit, ut eum cunctarum regionum paene incolam fuisse iudicetis, eoque fiat ut uno loco positi, sicut monachos decet, animo percurratis quod aliquorum peregrinatio plurimo labore collegit.” humanist studies & the digital age papio 5.1 (2017) 31 temporal reality. the peculiarly human fascination with distant times and places was also shared by boccaccio himself, of course. in fact, readers of these pages already appreciate the vast importance of the ancient world and its geography to boccaccio and his contemporaries. for this reason, it is superfluous to cite the normal examples.9 instead, i would like to call to your attention one of my favorite passages. after explaining caesar’s appearance in dante’s inferno, boccaccio writes: after caesar’s death, the escape of the conspirators, and the clearing of the judicial seats in the hall (which were called “rostra”), they prepared a pyre according to ancient custom and there burned caesar’s body with great reverence. his ashes were very diligently collected and placed within the bronze globe, which may still be seen atop the tall, pointed, quadrangular stone that is today located behind st peter’s church in rome. commoners call this stone aguglia, although its true name is julia.10 though much could be said in a geocritical vein about these lines, one quick “footnote” is enough. on the one hand, boccaccio is reporting information he had read in suetonius and one or more versions of the mirabilia; on the other, he is telling us that he had actually seen this monument in person. the third temporal reality mentioned above comes into being with the realization that this “tall, pointed, quadrangular stone” is the obelisk that stands today in the spacious square in front of the “new” st. peter’s at the vatican, the same one the reader may have seen in person or on television. the bronze globe is now lost, having been replaced by a cross, but the stone is the same. similarly, its geographic coordinates have shifted a bit, yet the tangible reality is still extant. even better than imagining dante standing beneath the leaning garisenda, at least to me, is imagining boccaccio as he in turn imagined another time, now gone, at those same coordinates. three temporal realities – suetonius’, boccaccio’s, and our own – are linked together in a single unstable geography: the placement of that one solemn obelisk. one may imagine a 3d-map or graph, not unlike the one below, where any single geographic point may be stretched upward or downward to represent the progression of time. you cannot step into the same arno twice, but you can make a mental journey to other years in its existence. all this may come across as a bit mawkish, to tell the truth; nevertheless, it is a sensation enthusiastically shared by boccaccio himself, not to mention petrarch (whose yearning to live in a previous era was not simply rhetorical). 9 the bibliography pertaining specifically to italian humanistic geography is not at all vast. bouloux has done an excellent job of collecting bits and pieces into a helpful whole. see also pastore stocchi. 10 the original reads: “appresso, fuggitisi i congiurati ed egli essendo morto, disfatte le sedie giudiciali della corte, le quali si chiamano «rostri», gliene fu fatto, secondo l’antico costume, un rogo, e con grandissimo onore fu il corpo suo arso, e le ceneri, racolte diligentemente, furon messe in quel vaso ritondo di bronzo, il quale ancora si vede sopra quella pietra quadrangula aguta ed alta, che è oggi dietro alla chiesa di san piero in roma, la quale il vulgo chiama aguglia, come che il suo vero nome sia giulia” (esposizioni 4.lit.200). humanist studies & the digital age papio 5.1 (2017) 32 not surprisingly, the use of maps can be helpful in imagining boccaccio’s own mental reconstructions, and especially helpful in understanding more fully how he uses them as backdrops for his own literary inventions. in fact, it is boccaccio himself who explains why geography should interest us. “it is very rare that anyone [inspired by poetry] ever manages to compose noteworthy works if he does not possess the necessary tools for expressing the images he has dreamt up,” he tells us. “hence, he must know the principles of the liberal arts, ethics and science. he must also be aware of his ancestors’ achievements and, indeed, mindful of the histories of nations, and their locations in the world, as well as those of seas, rivers and mountains.”11 there is no doubt that a knowledge of geography is important not only to understand the poets of the past, but also in order to become a good one in the present. furthermore, we know that boccaccio sincerely believed in this advice, inasmuch as his note to teseida 1.40.7 shows that he himself had made use of a carta da navicare to understand how the turkish straits were arranged. about fifty years ago, virginio bertolini published a fascinating discovery related to boccaccio’s use of maps in the narration of florio’s fictional journey in the filocolo, a work completed immediately before the teseida. bertolini’s impressive philological work demonstrates very convincingly that our author had used a copy of marino sanudo’s mapa de mari mediterraneo to compose the following description of the maritime journey that florio (under the assumed name filocolo) made from trapani to alexandria: so filocolo sailed off. each day the winds reinvigorated filocolo and blew him ever more forcefully onward, to the point that, after leaving gozo and malta behind, he found himself on the high seas and speeding away from land. on account of the slackening of the winds, and in order to arrive in rhodes, he chose the route toward alexandria. having passed schiza [crava], venetiko [venedigo], kithira [cetri], antikithira [sechilo] and pontikonisi [pondico], he arrived at the ancient land of minos, whence saturn was chased away by his son. he stayed in candia for a few days and then departed again. shortly after passing cape sideros [caposermon], 11 “[p]erraro inpulsus [scil. quidam poeta] commendabile perficit aliquid, si instrumenta, quibus meditate perfici consuevere, defecerint. […] hinc et liberalium […] artium et moralium atque naturalium […] novisse principia necesse est; nec non et vidisse monimenta maiorum, ac etiam meminisse et hystorias nationum et regionum orbis, marium, fluviorum et montium dispositiones” (genealogie 14.7.2-3). longitude latitude ti m e humanist studies & the digital age papio 5.1 (2017) 33 kasos [casso] and karpathos [scarpanto], he reached prasonisi [trachilo] and from there went on to lindos [lendego].12 sadly, there are only two extant witnesses of this map. however, one of them (vat. lat. 2972) gave bertolini just what he was hoping to find on c. 108r. figure 4 presents a tiny portion of that carta, rotated 90° clockwise so that the island of crete is more readily recognizable in the center of the image. (fig. 5 shows the same information on a modern map.) the section of florio’s journey that corresponds to the passage above is marked with a solid orange line, a bit thicker than the thin straight rhumblines, that runs west to east across the map. though not easy to see, these exotic place names (with a single exception) are all represented in perfect order and their variants are so slight that there can be little doubt that bertolini had found something special. without a map of this sort, boccaccio – or anyone else who had never sailed there – would have had difficulty reconstructing florio’s fictional voyage across this timeless stretch of sea with any geographical accuracy. and precision was an indispensable part of that fiction. figure 4 12 “navica adunque filocolo: e ciascun giorno più venti rinfrescano e pigliano forza in aiuto di filocolo, sì che in brieve, lasciandosi dietro gozo e moata, piglia l’alto mare fuggendo la terra. ma per mancamento di vento e per venire in rodi, torse il cammino d’alessandria, e passando crava, venedigo, cetri, sechilo e pondico, trovò l’antica terra di minòs, della quale saturno fu dal figliuolo cacciato. quivi alcun giorno dimorò in candia, e quindi partito, caposermon e casso e scarpanto trapassò in brieve e venne a trachilo, e di quindi a lendego” (filocolo 4.78.1-2) humanist studies & the digital age papio 5.1 (2017) 34 figure 5 it is quite logical and likely, then, that boccaccio continued to consult maps during the composition of the decameron. figure 6 shows another mediterranean journey, this time the one made by alatiel (2.7). figure 7 is the same aegean map boccaccio used to create a realistic trip for florio, this time with alatiel’s route traced upon it. did he use sanudo’s mapa here as well? no one has suggested it until now, but it seems indeed quite likely. the proximity of chios (where constanzio was residing “in lasciva vita con una sua donna,” 2.7.76) to smyrna (where osbech [a.k.a. sultan mohammed öz beg] happened to appear in the plot) creates a compelling geographical boundary between east and west. not unlike paris who crossed from asia minor to the peloponnesus and returned with helen, osbech leaves smyrna for chios and returns home with the similarly irresistible alatiel. in fact, the aegean was once a sort of magical geographical space, one that ulysses and aeneas both crossed as they sailed away from asia minor, which petrarch describes in his itinerarium as “once the most pleasant of provinces, filled with greek farmers after the fall of troy, and now the fierce territory of the turks, enemies of truth.”13 time had negatively changed the complexion of the spaces according to boccaccio as well. in the de montibus’ entry dedicated to this area of the world, he writes: “the aegean sea was once just as full of kingdoms, famous men and wonderful things as it was of islands, but nowadays it languishes under the vile scourge of servitude.”14 he evidently felt very strongly here (as in almost all his works, honestly) that the venetians had spread corruption, exploitation and decay, that the heyday of ancient greece was irrecoverably lost to the past. setting the action of any story in this region (cf. also dec. 4.3) adds the patina of an imagined past’s former glory to an otherwise sad, modern shabbiness. and viceversa. 13 “olim provinciarum mitissima, post troie ruinam grecis referta cultoribus, nunc turcorum veri hostium ferox regio” (petrarca itinerario, 72). 14 “egeum mare insularum eque et regnorum atque virorum illustrium et mirandarum rerum plenum fuit, hodie torpet vero turpi servitio obnoxium.” humanist studies & the digital age papio 5.1 (2017) 35 figure 6 humanist studies & the digital age papio 5.1 (2017) 36 figure 7 having looked at maps in reference to the filocolo and the decameron, anyone who is familiar with boccaccio’s latin works is by now expecting further considereation of his de montibus as well, and for very good reason.15 it contains an impressive wealth of geographical information, gleaned from the texts boccaccio knew earlier in his life, together with discoveries made in works that he was able to consult only much later, most importantly pomponius mela’s chorographia.16 although scholars 15 the bibliography of the de montibus is slight. the studies of greatest interest are pastore stocchi, bouloux, greppi and cachey, but much work remains to be done. 16 the importance of pliny to the de montibus is extraordinary. although scholars once thought that petrarch had provided boccaccio’s principal copy of the naturalis historia in the form of par. lat. 6802 (e.g, pastore stocchi, martellotti, zaccaria), which boccaccio had consulted (see fiorilla 41-64), more recent studies have demonstrated that he used a different witness for the passages transcribed in the zibaldone magliabechiano (perucchi, petoletti, reeve). pastore humanist studies & the digital age papio 5.1 (2017) 37 have expressed varying opinions about the work, it seems that everyone is in agreement that much more needs to be done. organized like a geographical dictionary, the entries are arranged by type: first mountains, then forests, springs, lakes, rivers, marshes, and finally seas. each headword was probably prepared first on a strip of paper and then incorporated into the proper section and in alphabetical order.17 in a very real sense, the geographical data he collected were treated already as discrete units that could be arranged, compared and contrasted with others. this configuration seems to be calling out for gis. as the work stands now, it is rather unwieldy and difficult to study. there are two other unfortunate facts: there is no extant autograph copy and currently no reliable critical edition of the work. since pastore stocchi’s 1998 edition, scholars have had the advantage of a readily accessible text, but with the disadvantage of an edition prepared, as he admits, “con criteri indubbiamente eclettici.”18 we have turned to philology because it, too, is a fundamental part of geocriticism, at least with regard to medieval studies. up to now preference has been given to how geospatial approaches can open doors in literary studies; the reverse is of course just as true. philology enabled bertolini to announce the discovery of boccaccio’s use of sanudo’s cartographic skills in his literary recreation of the seascape of ancient greece that we saw in the flights of florio and alatiel toward the east. with a sounder critical edition of boccaccio’s geographical dictionary, it will soon be possible to identify other maps with which he was familiar. the remainder of this essay will deal with an experiment of this sort. in 2012, francesco rubat borel published a brief paper in which he notes lexical similarities between the peutinger table and names in the entry related to the po river in the de montibus. he states: the fact that boccaccio refers to naburni and nantuani immediately leads one to surmise that he knew a document analogous to the tabula peutingeriana, whether a map, an itinerary or a geographic treatise that, though now lost, was extremely similar. there’s more: the reading nantuani, which is to my knowledge a hapax, for the common nantuates suggests a common source.19 he goes on to suggest the possibility that the peutinger table (or one of its close relatives) could have been the one petrarch sent to boccaccio in the summer of 1357 with a letter in which the former wrote: “alongside these [the volumes of the invective contra medicum], i am sending you this book, frayed from a long life and the worse for wear and tear, and also the ancient map of mine that stocchi’s theory that this same manuscript had nonetheless been used in the redaction of the later de montibus (1963, 6472) remains to be verified. albert lloret and i are not of the opinion that this is the case. 17 cf. blair 96-99, 210-13 et passim. 18 in boccaccio 1998, 2034. 19 “il fatto che boccaccio citi i naburni e i nantuani induce subito a supporre che conoscesse un documento analogo alla tabula peutingeriana, fosse una carta o un itinerario o un trattato geografico oggi perduto fortemente affine a quella. c’è di più: la lezione nantuani, che a me consta essere un hapax, invece del comune nantuates, fa propendere per una fonte comune” (rubat borel 81). humanist studies & the digital age papio 5.1 (2017) 38 you asked for.”20 we know that petrarch had a collection of old maps,21 but it is impossible to say with any level of certainty if this was one of them. in fact, and especially in the wake of recent proof that petrarch’s pliny was not the source of the excerpts in the zibaldone magliabechiano, it seems imprudent to assume that everything of particular interest on boccaccio’s desk had somehow been provided by the older poet. at any rate, we may set aside the question of where boccaccio had found a peutingerian map and examine rubat borel’s claim more closely. for this, we need a few more images: figure 8 provides a map of the northern apennines flanked by those cities boccaccio mentions in the first part of his description of the range; figure 9 shows the same area with an overlay of the roads and towns mentioned in the peutinger table,22 in such a way that one may more easily make sense of figures 10 and 11.23 in essence, rubat borel noticed that the peutinger table locates the source of the po (the dark squiggle labeled padus) between two populations: the nantuani and the naburni (fig. 10). upon reading in the de montibus that the po “begins at the very base of monte viso, establishing its initial course between the nantuani and the naburni,”24 it then occurred to him that this map could have been boccaccio’s source. while naburni is apparently a hapax related to the peutingerian tradition, that single observation is perhaps insufficient to support the idea that boccaccio knew a version of the 11-section parchment scroll (roughly one foot tall and twenty-two feet in length) that now exists in a single surviving witness.25 more evidence is required. let’s now turn to another section of the de montibus, this time the entry dedicated to the apennines: indeed, some say that it begins, like the alps, at the promontory of monaco near edge of the ligurian sea and tends roughly northward together with the alps, passing the bagienni [bagitennos] on its right. when it reaches the nantuates 20 “cum quibus et librum istum senio victum, et canum morsibus lacerum, simul et vetustissimam meam quam postulas cartam mitto” (petrarca opera, 1199). the timeworn book mentioned here is the one pastore stocchi thought could be ms. par. lat. 6802. rubat borel suggests interesting conjectures, based on the work of guatier dalché, about the provenance and the eventual fate of this peutingerian map. 21 see petrarca postille, 329-30. 22 fig. 9 was provided by rené voorburg’s online project omnesviae: roman routeplanner (omnesviae.org). 23 images of the peutinger table were taken from the dynamic viewer (http://peutinger.atlantides.org/map-a/) published online as ancillary material to talbert. note that fig. 10 belongs to the left of fig. 11 and that when put together word liguri should then be legible. 24 “alii dicunt quod in infimis radicibus vesuli oriatur et inter naburnos et nantuanos arripiat primo cursum.” despite the fact that the reading is identical in this case to pastore stocchi’s (in boccaccio de montibus, 1961), all quotations of the de montibus are taken from the as yet unpublished edition being prepared by albert lloret and myself. 25 conventional wisdom holds that the peutinger table is an early thirteenth-century copy of an original from late antiquity, but emily albu has convincingly argued that the original was instead a carolingian display map. humanist studies & the digital age papio 5.1 (2017) 39 [nantuanos] of gaul, it bends eastward, leaving them to its left and the sengauni to its right in the environs of albintimilium, albigaunum, genoa and the veleiates [veliates] of gaul, while on its other side are the cisalpine gauls and augusta taurinorum.26 this description is really very remarkable. if one compares it to the section of the table represented in figure 10, it begins to seem more like a verbal sketch of this map than a portrayal of cisalpine geography. the course of the alps (represented by a faint, irregular undulating line that runs from the bottom left of fig. 10 diagonally upwards to a lake in the top-right corner) is intersected by that of the apennines which breaks off from it and runs between the “nantuani” and the “bagitenni,” precisely as boccaccio relates. it is this second line that he is following. the line of the apennines continues into figure 11 where it runs more or less horizontally from left to right, dividing the image into two halves: a top (to the left of the mountain range) and a bottom (to its right). the range passes the “senguani” (written on the map in black ink) and the “veliate” (in red) to its right; to its left is augusta taurinorum. there is no additional hapax here, unfortunately, but the spelling “bagitenni” is certainly not the most usual form (arnaldi et al. 252-53). more interesting still is the next section of the apennines’ description (much of which is visible in fig. 12): from there, it bends southeastward toward the tyrrhenian sea, the city of luna, lucca, pisa, pistoia and the most noble tuscan city of florence to its south. to its north it passes the po river, parma, vergil’s mantua, reggio emilia, modena and the university town of bologna. moving from that point onward, it passes arezzo, cortona, lake trasimeno, perugia, foligno, spoleto, bevagna, todi, bolsena, civita castellana, narni and rome, the city that was once the master of the world. to its left, it passes cornelii forum, which we also call imola, faenza, forlì and forlimpopoli, then curva cesena, rimini, pesaro, fano and senigallia.27 instead of ancient indigenous peoples, cities now represent the boundaries of the apennines. the description is made in two sections. in the first, boccaccio names several cities along the old via 26 “hic autem secundum quosdam a promontorio monichi circa finem ligustini maris incipit, unde et alpes, et in aquilonem fere tendens una cum alpibus a dextris linquit bagitennos, et cum ad nantuanos gallos devenit in orientem flectitur eis a sinistris derelictis et sengaunis a dextris, ubi albintimilium et albingaunum et ianuam et veliates galli, cum ex parte alia habeat cispadanos et augustam taurinorum.” 27 “et inde in euroaustrum vergens tyrrhenum mare, lunam civitatem, lucam, pisas, pistorium et nobilissimam tuscie civitatem florentiam ad meridiem sinit. ad aquilonem autem padum fluvium, parmam, mantuam virgilii, regium lepidum, mutinam et studiorum matrem bononiam. hinc a dextris ad ulteriora procedens aretium, cortonam, trasimenum lacum, perusium, fulgineum, spolitium, mevaniam, tudertum, vulsinas, faleros, narnias et olim rerum dominam urbem romam conspicit. a leva autem cornelii forum, quod et ymolam dicimus, faventiam et ravennam sabinorum coloniam, forum livii et popilii, inde curvam cesenam, ariminum, pensaurum, fortune fanum et senogalliam.” humanist studies & the digital age papio 5.1 (2017) 40 cassia from luna to florence, then more on the other side of the range along the old via aemilia from parma to bologna. in the second, he follows the same pattern: first naming the towns on the remainder of the via cassia from north to south, then the rest of the via aemilia to rimini and along the via flaminia and the coast as far as ancona. insofar as these ancient roads skirt the foothills on either side of the apennines, not much of unique solid evidence can be found here. not much, that is, except the name curva cesena, which like naburni has long been associated with the peutinger table (fig. 13).28 almost all of the de montibus’ extant witnesses carry this reading, including every one of those that can be considered most reliable.29 it seems that there is genuine proof that rubat borel was correct. this discovery will open the door to new studies of boccaccio’s use of the peutinger tradition and to new investigations of the table’s own history. in the preceding pages, an attempt has been made, however modest, to suggest that intelligent maps based on thoughtful criteria can lead to new areas of research, or at the very least can provide geospatial paratexts that will be useful to research that is already in full swing. i would certainly stop short of proposing that they could add “new lustre to a tired field,” as moretti’s publicist claimed, but it is not at all difficult to imagine literary mapping as an activity that can assist in opening unprecedented windows on boccaccio’s world. figure 8 28 see solari, santoro bianchi and talbert 160. 29 not recognizing the name curva, pastore stocchi emended it to cervia, which – though geographically sensible – is present only in the generally untrustworthy ms. 5316 of the biblioteca casanatense. humanist studies & the digital age papio 5.1 (2017) 41 figure 9 figure 10 humanist studies & the digital age papio 5.1 (2017) 42 figure 11 figure 12 humanist studies & the digital age papio 5.1 (2017) 43 figure 13 humanist studies & the digital age papio 5.1 (2017) 44 works cited albu, emily. “imperial geography and the medieval peutinger map.” imago mundi 57.2 (2005): 13648. almagià, roberto. planisferi, carte nautiche e affini dal secolo xiv al xvii esistenti nella biblioteca apostolica vaticana. città del vaticano: biblioteca apostolica vaticana, 1944. arnaldi, adelina, gianfranco gaggero, rossella pera, eleonora salomone and luigi santi amantini. fontes ligurum et liguriae antiquae. genova: società ligure di storia patria, 1976. bertolini, virginio. “le carte geografiche nel filocolo.” studi sul boccaccio 5 (1968): 212-25. blair, ann m. too much to know: managing scholarly information before the modern age. new havenlondon: yale university press, 2010. boccaccio, giovanni. decameron. v. branca, ed. 2 vols. torino: einaudi, 1991. ——. esposizioni sopra la comedia di dante. g. padoan, ed. in vol. 6 of tutte le opere. milano: mondadori, 1965. ——. filocolo. a. e. quaglio, ed. in vol. 1 of tutte le opere. milano: mondadori, 1967. ——. genealogie deorum gentilium. v. zaccaria, ed. de montibus, silvis, fontibus, lacubus, fluminibus, stagnis seu paludibus et de diversis nominibus maris. m. pastore stocchi, ed. in vols. 7-8 of tutte le opere. milano: mondadori, 1998. ——. teseida delle nozze d’emilia. e. agostinelli and w. coleman, eds. firenze: edizioni del galluzzo, 2015. bouloux, nathalie. culture et savoirs géographiques en italie au xiv e siècle. tumhout: brepols, 2002. cachey, theodore j. “between text and territory (de montibus, silvis, fontibus, lacubus, fluminibus, stagnis seu paludibus et de diversis nominibus maris).” in boccaccio: a critical guide to the complete works. v. kirkham, m. sherberg and j. smarr, eds. chicago: chicago university press, 2013. 273-79. cassiodorus senator, flavius magnus aurelius. cassiodori senatoris institutiones. r. a. b. mynors, ed. oxford: clarendon, 1961. fiorilla, maurizio. «marginalia» figurati nei codici di petrarca. firenze: olschki, 2005. greppi, claudio. “il dizionario geografico di boccaccio. luoghi e paesaggi nel de montibus. in boccaccio geografo. un viaggio nel mediterraneo tra le città, i giardini e … il ‘mondo’ di giovanni boccaccio. r. morosini, ed. firenze: polistampa 2010. 89-102. harley, j. b. and david woodward, eds. cartography in prehistoric, ancient, and medieval europe and the mediterranean. vol. 1 of their history of cartography. chicago-london: university of chicago press, 1987. lelewel, joachim. géographie du moyen age. 5 vols. bruxelles: pilliet, 1852-57. martellotti, guido. “il de montibus del boccaccio.” in dante e boccaccio, e altri scrittori dall’umanesimo al romanticismo. firenze: olschki, 1983. 185-96. merrills, a. h. history and geography in late antiquity. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2005. moretti, franco. an atlas of the european novel, 1800-1900. london: verso, 1998. ——. graphs, maps, trees. abstract models for a literary history. london-new york: verso, 2005. pastore stocchi, manlio. tradizione medievale e gusto umanistico nel “de montibus” del boccaccio. firenze: olschki, 1963. perucchi, giulia. “boccaccio geografo lettore del plinio petrarchesco.” italia medioevale e umanistica 54 (2013): 153-211. petoletti, marco. “boccaccio e plinio il vecchio: gli estratti dello zibaldone magliabechiano.” studi sul boccaccio 41 (2013): 257-93. petrarca, francesco. itinerario al sepolcro del signore nostro gesù cristo. f. guelfi, tr. genova: san marco dei giustiniani, 2006. ——. opera quae extant omnia. 3 vols. repr. of the 1581 basel ed. ridgewood, nj: gregg, 1965. humanist studies & the digital age papio 5.1 (2017) 45 ——. le postille del virgilio ambrosiano. 2 vols. m. baglio, a. nebuloni testa and m. petoletti, eds. roma-padova, antenore, 2006. porta casucci, emanuela. “‘un uomo di vetro’ fra corti e cortili. giovanni boccaccio, i del buono, i rossi e gli altri.” heliotropia 12-13 (2015-16): 189-212. reeve, michael d. “the text of boccaccio’s excerpts from pliny’s natural history.” italia medioevale e umanistica 54 (2013): 135-52. rubat borel, francesco. la tabula peutingeriana, boccaccio e due etnici antichi delle alpi occidentali. historikά 5.2 (2012): 79-85. santoro bianchi, sara. “curva caesena: nuovi dati sulla città romana.” in architettura e pianificazione urbana nell’italia antica. l. quilici and s. quilici gigli. roma: l’erma di bretschneider, 1997. 159-72. solari, arturo. “curva caesena.” bullettino della commissione archeologica comunale di roma 56 (1928): 133-40. talbert, richard j. a. rome’s world: the peutinger map reconsidered. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2010. tally, robert t. “introduction: on geocriticism.” in geocritical explorations. space, place, and mapping in literary and cultural studies. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2011. 1-9. westphal, bertrand. la géocritique, réel, fiction, espace. paris: éditions de minuit, 2007. ——. le monde plausible: espace, lieu, carte. paris: éditions de minuit, 2011. ——. the plausible world. a geocritical approach to space, place, and maps. a. d. wells, tr. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2013. ——. le rivage des mythes: une géocritique méditerranéenne, le lieu et son mythe. limoge: presses univ. limoges, 2001. zaccaria, vittorio. “boccaccio e plinio il vecchio.” studi sul boccaccio 18 (1989): 389-96. humanist studies & the digital age, 6.1 (2019) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.6.1.6 86 #lauraspeaks: remediations of pellegra bongiovanni’s “risposte” elisa briante, marena lear, and gerardo pisacane abstract: this paper examines the implications of digital remediation which translates and transforms an older text, endowing it with new life, in relation to the project #lauraspeaks, a translation and remediation of pellegra bongiovanni’s risposte di madonna laura alle rime di messer francesco petrarca, in nome della medesima. divided into three different sections, it describes the steps involved in this project, from the discovery of the original text and the analysis of bongiovanni’s contribution within the realm of petrarchism, moving to a discussion of the translation of her work from italian to english and the creation of the “twitterature” version of the text, then finally to an analysis of the text’s transformation into the film medium. this paper also investigates the theoretical premises of digital remediation and the role that hypertext plays in multiplying opportunities for meaning-making and in enriching the act of reading and writing. introduction much recent francesco petrarca scholarship has focused attention on the idea that the powerful vernacular voice of humanism was not a singular voice, but a plural one. he fashioned and refashioned himself and his work throughout the course of his life, and “the inner conflicts, the selfdoubts, the subjection to love, the yearning for earthly glory, and the following penance and regret are as much carefully constructed postures in dialogue with a web of other texts and voices as they are reflections of the writer's inner, psychological conditions” (ascoli & falkeid 1). petrarca deliberately positioned himself as the lynchpin in a network of voices from classical antiquity, from his contemporary milieu, and from the future readers he envisioned. this positioning contributed to the key role he played in the formation of the european lyric discourse, which was in large part shaped by his conception of the act of writing as creation of the self, and thus never fixed or complete. the continuous emphasis on the practice of writing that permeates the canzoniere, and the idea that the individual consciousness created through the act of writing “cannot transcend the practice that makes them possible” (lollini “return” 71) parallels petrarca’s own obsessive revisions of this work. it is this quality of petrarca’s work that made him an inspiration for the petrarchist style of writing that followed him, as well as an ideal subject for a digital project based on translation and remediation. this was the seed for the oregon petrarch open book (opob) project, a digital hypertext which “document[s] the multiple, potentially infinite lives of petrarch’s canzoniere” (lollini “return” 72) the methodology behind the opob was the basis for our project, the translation and remediation(s) of pellegra bongiovanni’s collection of poetry, risposte di madonna laura alle rime di messer francesco http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 87 petrarca, in nome della medesima. this project is both a creative and critical endeavor which highlights bongiovanni’s unique style and contribution to the tradition of petrarchism by creating the first translation of the poems into english, and draws it into the digital sphere through two different remediations: twitter poetry and a short video. through the connection of this project to the opob, our work becomes an extension of the database of rvf scholarship and works based on the rvf, and thus another iteration of the ‘afterlife’ of this important and influential collection of poetry. this paper then addresses the following questions: given the long tradition of petrarchism, what is important about pellegra bongiovanni’s particular contribution? and what does it mean to connect this work to a larger digital database of rvf scholarship? following the hermeneutic mode of interpretation, the remediations linked together by a hypertext such as the opob allows for an understanding of the meaning of individual texts to be co-constitutive with other texts and with a specific historical context. in a kind of digital poetics of relation, each individual text retains its particularity and opacity, but is understood in its relation to other texts. in its position as one star in a constellation of petrarca scholarship, pellegra bongiovanni’s poetry does not become merely subsumed into the large body of work, rather it becomes one important node within a non-hierarchical network of connections which contributes something new to the whole, and in return is fed by those connections. by creating remediations of bongiovanni’s unique work, and connecting them to the opob, we allow her work to add a fresh perspective to petrarca scholarship, opening a new dimension of interpretation of petrarca’s work that arises in the conversation between the two authors. translating and transforming the poems into a hypertext format is also a remediation of a different kind of ‘hypertext’ that existed in italian society at the time the poems were written, when it was common to share writings among authors, who would draw from and add to one another’s work. in addition, given that the poetry itself is an “answering back,” an interrogation of and reaction to petrarca’s poems about laura in the voice of laura herself, our remediations of the poems emphasize the dynamic and dialogic quality of bongiovanni’s work. the metanarrative of the video focuses on the act of writing as itself relational and dynamic; moreover, it brings into focus the collaborative nature of not just writing, but different forms of media (hypermediacy). given the collaborative nature of this project – including that of the three participants but also the digital readership and rewriting made possible through hypertextualization – this work embodies pierre lévy’s concept of a “collective intelligence” which is the symbiosis between personal learning and collective learning, a growing ecosystem of ideas. 1. voicing laura: pellegra bongiovanni’s challenge elisa briante 1.1 petrarca and petrarchism in the digital era why is petrarca so important? why do we still talk about him in 2019, and why can we still identify ourselves in his poetry? it is not just for the quality of his literary production. petrarca tried to create a relationship between his readers and himself through the experience of love, the most common and yet dehumanizing personal experience. the love tradition on which petrarca relies talks about a kind of love, called amor cortese (courtly love), which tortures the poet with fire, arrows and chains, and which is never consummated or even reciprocated. as opposed to the love towards the women humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 88 described as angels by the poets of the dolce stil novo, petrarca’s love for laura is a more earthly love, grounded in images of nature, though in the end of the canzoniere she is what makes a vision of god possible for petrarca: “menami al suo signor. allor m’inchino,/ pregando humilemente che consenta/ ch’i’ stia a veder et l’uno et l’altro volto” (petrarca, opob poem 362, incunabulum). in petrarca’s lyric, the figure of laura becomes both an incarnation of love and a representation of the poet’s desire to reach god. but who is madonna laura? for many years, she was considered just a fictional and allegorical character invented by petrarca to justify his love towards laurum, the laurel, which represented poetic glory. petrarca himself, in some epistolary exchanges with his friends, often defended the real existence of his beloved, but “few seemed to believe that laura was ever spirans, alive” (russo 500). whether laura was a real person or not was considered an important issue by the petrarchists, as a key to fully investigate and understand petrarca’s intentions. so, from the second half of the xv century on, some intellectuals began to carry out research about her. vellutello found out that she could have been a member of the de sade family, and this hypothesis was supported in 1533 by the discovery -or maybe the creationof her tomb inside the de sade family sepulcher. according to a 1764 biography of petrarca, written by a descendant of the de sade family, laura was identified as laura de noves, wife of hugo de sade, mother of 11 children, who died of disease in 1348. obviously, the interest towards laura cannot be separated from the will to dig up petrarca’s life, in order to better understand his poetry. though it is uncertain whether or not laura was indeed a real person, it is perhaps more interesting to consider how she functions symbolically in petrarca’s work, and how his characterization of her led him towards his unique style. through the literary existence of laura, petrarca created an alter ego, which allowed him to write himself through an ‘other’ and explore two different kinds of alterities: the first one, as petrarca becomes aware of his inability to appropriately reduce and describe laura’s figure through poetry, is the revelation of his ethical consciousness, inherited by platonism and stoicism. secondly, laura’s death allows him to probe notions of time and death in order to understand his earthly mortality. petrarca’s love for laura is a mechanism through which petrarca the writer is able to investigate what it means to be human. “even before the invention of the printing press […], petrarca’s philology and humanist style initiated a new form of knowledge, in which memorization and literal transcription are substituted for an endless process of intellectual research” (lollini 75). petrarca’s research was carried on by several writers, who started imitating his style. this literary phenomenon is called “petrarchism” and it began during petrarca’s lifetime and continued to grow over the next three centuries. according to berdan, imitations of petrarch can be generally divided into two different categories: the form-based imitation or the content-based ones; gigliucci even distinguishes between 13 different styles of petrarchism that can sometimes be overlapped: classicist, pastoral, solemn, anti-solemn, philosophical, madrigalist, experimental, feminine and homophile, nuptial (for the wife), spiritual, hybrid, artificial and new-courtly. the literary productions which fit into these different categories would nowadays be considered, to various extents, as forms of plagiarism; indeed, until the romantic period, imitation was considered both as a tribute to the original author, and a reliable and effective compositional method. as jossa holds, the question of authorship and imitation from the xvi century up to leopardi had completely different values, compared to the contemporary ones, since reading and writing were inter-dependent: “every reading experience led to writing, and every written humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 89 composition was partially a re-writing of previous readings” (jossa 13). this process and the imitation practice of petrarchism, even though it could sound far from contemporary standards of authorship, is extremely familiar for contemporary digital writers/readers, as the internet is an almost-unlimited repository of words and different forms of literature. especially on social media, people are expected not only to read those words, but also to go through a process of personalization and re-writing of what they found -by chance or by researchon the web. the result is a continuous and self-nourishing circle of readings and writings which allows a wide spreading of culture never seen before, but which also gives rise to problems linked to the idea of authorship. unfortunately, after the romantic literary classification process, petrarchists’ productions were dismissed as pure imitations of petrarca and some of them, mostly those written by women, completely disappeared from the body of italian literature. this is exactly what happened to pellegra bongiovanni’s work risposte a nome di madonna laura alle rime di messer francesco petrarca in vita della medesima, as well as her other works. petrarchism is such a widespread and complex undertaking that only a digital project could do justice to it, as petrarca influenced not only italian literature, but other national literatures and linguistic traditions, as well as working across all kinds of media. a digital project can bring together words, images, audio and video; moreover, it is always open to contributions, modifications and implementations. the project we are describing is what one might call “a spin-off” of the opob hypertext: the digitalized canzoniere speaks to another canzoniere, and the words of petrarca finally get an answer coming directly in the voice of laura, embodied by pellegra. pellegra bongiovanni represents a special case: she is not the only female petrarchist but, as far as we know, she was the only one who created a real dialogue between petrarca and laura. despite the criticism that buried her work in the shadows of italian literature both as a woman and a petrarchist, her style, writing quality and innovative spirit deserve to be recognized. 1.2 pellegra bongiovanni: life and works pellegra bongiovanni’s name is seldom mentioned and mostly in depreciative ways from the second half of the xix century. the only exception we found so far is a textbook for a girls’ school published in palermo in 1873, in which bongiovanni was defined as “an expert in painting, music and poetry […] wise and full of virtues” (pedone lauriel qtd. in spallicci 105). the entry about pellegra in the treccani encyclopedia, one of the most important encyclopedias in the italian language, defines her work as “an irrelevant proof of petrarca’s legacy in the xviii century” (marziano). this is even more surprising when we compare this definition to her popularity during her life and up to fifty years after her death. pellegra bongiovanni was born in palermo at the beginning of the xviii century; her father was a painter and he was the first who recognized her intelligence, supporting her education. pellegra was able to read latin, greek and was skilled in poetry, music and painting. in 1742 she married the lawyer jacopo rossetti and they moved to rome, where they had a daughter, marianna, who also became a poetess. pellegra was a recognized member of the “accademia dei riaccesi” of palermo and of “accademia degli arcadi” of rome under the pseudonym of ersilia gortinia. her importance within the literary academia is proven by her epistolary exchange with casimiro drago, who asked for her opinion about his translation of virgilio’s ecogle pastorali, and mainly by the fact that she was one of humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 90 the few women among the arcadians who performed her poems for the celebrations of the miraculous healing of john v, king of portugal, and of the coronation of joseph ii as king of romans. her name is also mentioned is several marriage celebration records and she composed two musical plays, aminta and aristodemo, which went missing, and an oratorio in four voices, la madre della patria santa rosalia, with music by michele maurici. 1.3 “riposte di madonna laura” in 1762, the roman publisher frazesi e paperi, which specialized in erudite and ecclesiastic books, published pellegra’s most famous work, risposte di madonna laura alle rime di messer francesco petrarca, in nome della medesima, with the authorization of both the catholic church and the arcadia. the book opens with an introduction divided in two parts, a dedication to the tuscan cardinal neri corsini and a warning: pellegra recapitulates similar, previous works and presents her own, claiming that whatever the readers find to be “weak, it is attributable to the stupidity of my [her] genre; and if they will find something praiseworthy, it is due to the strength of imitation” (bongiovanni, qtd. in crivelli & fedi 15). in this clear example of captatio benevolentiae, she tries to evoke some sympathy in her readers but, while petrarca constantly does it in his poems, pellegra restrains it to her introduction, since he is the only direct addressee of her poetry. according to the spirit of her time, in which the epistolary novel was the main style6, she turns the canzoniere into a dialogue between petrarch and his muse, finally not silent anymore. pellegra was not the first author who tried to give voice to laura, however: hyeronimo maripietro in 1536 and stephano colonna in 1552, both mentioned in the risposte’s introduction, had already voiced laura, but as a spirit that tries to purify petrarch’s desire and bring him closer to god. in the mid xvi century, by contrast, camillo scroffa parodied petrarch’s canzoniere in his cantici di fidenzio, portraying laura as a man. the risposte are not just love poems, nor are they parodies or moral corrections of petrarca’s canzoniere: pellegra is the only author who provided laura with a plausible, corporeal, female voice, fulfilling a literary space left empty by previous authors and by petrarca himself. pellegra writes 235 poems, whereas there are 366 poems in the canzoniere: she only answers those poems directly addressed to laura while she was alive, since “the spirits detached from the bodies are not able to feel those emotions that are able to trouble them while they are still enclosed in flesh” (bongiovanni 15). the muse becomes a writer, the object of love becomes a reasoning subject: the poetess, as a married woman herself, shows the struggle of a married woman seduced by the long courtship of a single poet who then consciously surrenders to this forbidden and bitter love. as fedi and crivelli point put in their introduction to the most recent edition of the risposte, the dialogue between laura/pellegra and petrarca assumes the shape of a “bourgeois” love story (crivelli-fedi, “introduzione” 26), with everyday situations, in which laura needs to hide her love in order to respect her social role, but she also suffers because petrarca seems unable to understand the signs she keeps sending to him, giving us a portrait of their perpetual miscommunication. laura/pellegra is not intimidated by petrarca’s love, but refuses physical passion for its own sake, instead considering it as the first step towards real love. even if pellegra followed both the arcadia rules, which established a writing style recalling xvi century works, and petrarca’s style, her modernity and her linguistic background show up in some vocabulary choices of spanish-derived words or structure (i.e. “unqua” from “nunca”, never; “penso humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 91 in” from “pienso en”, i think about…; endings of the first person singular of the italian subjunctive following the spanish scheme) and the loss of latin, archaic forms (i.e. h drop, “huom” – petrarch/ “uom” – pellegra; assimilations i.e. ct > tt.). in the introduction, pellegra claims that she only began imitating petrarch as a stylistic exercise: she kept the last word of every line in each poem, maintaining the same rhymes, but played with the verses through metaphors and processes of trans-codification and reordering, showing extraordinary writing skills and language control, but also wit and irony. she wanted to publish petrarca’s poems (in italics, on odd pages) alongside her own, not with the arrogance of putting herself at the same level as petrarca the author, but with the will to show a direct and equal interaction between the two lovers petrarca and laura. the decline of bongiovanni’s fame started in 1832, when antonio lombardi continued tiraboschi’s storia letteraria (literary history) erasing the equality provided by the dialogue structure and defined the risposte as “an affected female variation of petrarch’s canzoniere”. in 1859, scinà claimed that her work was “full of effort but empty of value”, just a mixture of “miserable dullness which would have defused petrarch’s love” and up to 1991, in a publication for the third centennial of the arcadia, bongiovanni’s poems were still considered “almost ridiculous” (graziosi). it was only in 2014, thanks to tatiana crivelli, professor of italian literature for the university of zurich and roberto fedi, professor of italian literature for the university of perugia, that pellegra’s work was finally restored to its original dialogic form and value. their critical edition includes an introduction that finally recognizes the value of pellegra’s poetry, and the text republished in milan in 1763 by antonio palazzi, discovered by prof. fedi at the newberry library of chicago, while he was carrying out other research (fedi, interview). 1.4 the project #lauraspeaks the aim of our project is to remediate, through different media and languages, the risposte di madonna laura, in order to make it known and accessible to a broader, international public. we divided the workload in our team according to our background and expertise, also scheduling weekly meetings to discuss and peer-evaluate our individual work. the risposte had already undergone a first remediation process even before we started our project, because it moved from printed paper to digital images, and so we did not use printed books but two scanned copies of the risposte, as published by crivelli and fedi in their critical version and palazzi’s version. we chose to type the poems into a simple word document, turning the digital images into digital text, in order to work more easily and to be able to analyze the internal coherence of our translations at the end. we selected 24 of bongiovanni’s sonnets and translated them into english. we developed our project restoring the dialogic, original form of the risposte: using the pre-existing resources of the oregon petrarch open book, 7 we put together petrarch’s original poems digitized from the critical versions of savoca and contini, petrarca’s poem translations and tweets together with laura/pellegra’s voice. from the comparison between petrarca’s critical editions included in the opob, pellegra’s original words and pellegra’s periphrases we drafted a basic prose translation and then turned it into a poetic translation. after deep analysis and translation, we condensed the poems’ meanings into tweets following the methodology elaborated by the opob (lollini-rosenberg), humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 92 creating a twitter dialogue between the pre-existing petrarch tweets and the new ones from pellegra/laura. this dialogue shaped the underlying structure of our final remediation: a short movie that will be published on youtube. our hope is that this project would only be the first step towards a full translation of pellegra’s risposte and towards restoring her well-deserved but long-forgotten literary legacy. 2. a living text: pellegra bongiovanni’s “risposte” and theories of remediation marena lear 2.1 translation as transformation unease over the “adequacy” of translations has dominated the field of literary studies almost since the practice began. many have written extensively about what makes a good or a bad translation, and examined the ethics of translation within the global system of exchange. these are issues that do require close examination, as translations of a work can have profound impacts on the way the original is received and understood. in undertaking the translation of thirty of bongiovanni’s poems, we have attempted to, as walter benjamin put it, create the latest “unfolding” of the life of the source text. by “unfolding” a new iteration of the text, our goal was not to close its meaning, but rather open a work that was overlooked for centuries to a new readership, highlighting its place on the periphery of italian literature. in the spirit of poststructuralist translation theory, which “calls attention to the exclusions and hierarchies that are masked by the realist illusion of transparent language, the fluent translating that seems untranslated” (venuti 329), our translations of bongiovanni in a certain sense intentionally highlight the impossibility of transparent translation – the “failure” of equivalence becomes the disjunction that seeds new possibilities of reading and interpretation. the goal was to destabilize both languages in order to deconstruct accepted or familiar understandings and establish new relations. given that language itself is a living symbolic system that is constantly transforming and evolving, this destabilization, first through translation into english and then remediation into tweets, is not such a radical step, especially considering the long tradition of compiling, rewriting, and imitating texts in european literary history. our twitter versions of the poems are not only condensed forms of the translations, but creative remediations that within the hypertext, take on a living quality that the reader can choose to engage with alongside other petrarca poems, musical and artistic renderings, poetic re-writings, and translations. bongiovanni’s work is an important part of the petrarchism tradition, and its inclusion into the opob highlights its essential relationship to the rvf and places it on a level equal to other petrarchists to whom history has been kinder. at the same time, “this apparatus of metatexts that constitute the corpus of the opob hypertext around petrarch’s rvf allows us to trace in a new, more accurate and comprehensive fashion its reception over the centuries as a collection of poems that maintain their individuality and autonomy while at the same time entering in multilateral relationships both within petrarch’s forms of the canzoniere and in the broader and multifaceted contexts represented by what we call petrarchism.” (lollini “return” 76) thus, the inclusion of the risposte within this hypertext in turn enriches the readings of the rvf itself. in creating the english translation of the risposte, and recreating it in and through digital mediums, our goal was to give humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 93 laura/bongiovanni’s voice a strong echo throughout the vast realm of petrarchan scholarship, and to bring this dialogue between laura and petrarca into the 21st century english-language digital conversation. 2.2 a digital poetics the process of translation of this work was multi-layered. first, a native italian speaker (elisa briante) read the original poem and then created a literal translation into english. secondly, looking at both the original and the first translation draft, i created a second draft in english, with the intention to make the literal translation into a poem that conveys as much of the content of the original as possible while paying attention to the form. next, our team (consisting of two native italian speakers, briante and gerardo pisacane, and myself, a native english and spanish speaker) revised the second draft together and evaluated the quality of the second translation. one challenge of course was my limited of knowledge of italian, but i found that in practice this was not as much of a barrier as it first appeared to be. the collaborative nature of this translation work resulted in a capacity to shift away from my habitual thinking in english and examine that familiar language anew, from a distance. not only was i engaging with a language that was foreign to me, i was attempting to make the translation accommodate three individual interpretations of the source text, and because of these factors i was consistently obliged to expand and shift the borders of my target language, and question my own interpretation of the text. another significant task was transposing the poetic form; the italian lines balance a lilting rhythm with a strict rhyme scheme. despite roman jakobson’s assertion that “poetry by definition is untranslatable” (143), i have attempted it nonetheless, and i chose not to prioritize rhyme by attempting to force the poems into a rhyme scheme and iambic meter. instead, i maintained the content of each line, kept the sonnet sequence of an octave followed by a sestet, and embraced end rhymes and internal rhymes when they seemed to occur naturally. at certain moments it was fitting to emphasize alliteration or assonance, such as in sonnet number eleven, where the repetition of the soft “f” and “s” serves to sound out the frustrated, persistent sighs of francesco the lover: but the soul can only be free when the body has failed. your gazes, sighs, and fickle face made the force of your flames all too clear to my soul; thus it was fear that made me veil my breast and face… as lawrence venuti asserts in the translator’s invisibility, “both foreign text and translation are derivative: both consist of diverse linguistic and cultural materials that neither the foreign writer nor the translator originates, and that destabilize the work of signification, inevitably exceeding and possibly conflicting with their intentions” (18). i take this as my point of departure when considering my role as translator: there exists no such thing as a ‘fixed,’ authentic, definitive text that is then distorted by translation. rather, every text’s ‘meaning’ is contingent upon its specific linguistic and historical context. friedrich schleiermacher argues that the hermeneutic mode of interpretation brings the text into dialogue with other texts, and this comparative approach does not deny the uniqueness of an individual text, rather it acknowledges its distinctive attributes as relational rather than ontological. when i work on the translation of pellegra bongiovanni’s text, i do so with the awareness that i am reconstituting this text in accordance with values, beliefs and representations that preexist humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 94 in 21st century english, and therefore i am not under any illusion that i am translating with perfect semantic equivalence – on the contrary, my attempt has been to emphasize the difference of the italian text without completely domesticating it, or making it perfectly digestible for a modern englishspeaking readership. this is the method venuti refers to as “foreignization”. it is for this reason that the poems, although in italian they follow a strict rhyme scheme, and thus maintain a more natural flow, in english they have not been forced into a rhyme scheme. i also chose to maintain the delayedsubject organization of many phrases, rather than moving the subject closer to the beginning of the sentence as is more common in english. one example of this is in sonnet number 67: pigmalione invidiar non dei, ch’ora in sasso, ora in donna, e assai piú volte mi trasformo di quel, che non vorrei. do not envy pygmalion, because into stone, into woman, and into many other forms, i am transformed against my will. here, the delayed subject is the i, and the delay in finding the i within the phrase mirrors the main idea of the poem, which is that the speaker, laura, is not able to find herself within the many transformations and metamorphoses to which the poet petrarca has subjected her. for him she lives, quite literally, in his imagination, and therefore the real laura always eludes him as he attempts to find her in everything but her flesh-and-blood body. throughout the poems, laura insists on her autonomy, drawing attention to every moment in which it is denied her in petrarca’s poems. at the same time, she conveys a deep understanding of the lover’s (or writer’s) condition as reliant upon the expression of that love for its continued existence. bongiovanni, like petrarca, was cognizant that writing is the only tool through which language can define the borders of the radically singular self, but this consciousness that is developed in writing does not transcend writing itself, thus it is of necessity a continuous process. as massimo lollini argues, “writing for petrarch is not simply the neutral technology devoted to registering his emotions and the idols of his desire. it also constitutes the fundamental tool to appreciate the borders of human and individual consciousness and the limits of representation of the self and the other that he does not conceive in ontological terms but as a performative gesture” (“return” 71). this is strikingly similar to the way in which today, our continuous engagement with digital text, via social media, blogs, vlogs, etc., seems to be the primary way we perform our selfhood. we firmly delineate the borders of our online selves through our carefully curated profiles, yet we know those selves to be dependent on how they are received, read, shared, and rewritten. this is essentially the premise behind remediation. according to bolter and grusin, remediation did not begin with the appearance of digital media, rather it has been an ongoing process throughout the last several hundred years of western visual representation. remediation is “the way in which one medium is seen by our culture as reforming or improving upon another”; it is “the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms” (59). humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 95 2.3 twitterature and the digital remediation of bongiovanni in 21st century digital culture, text has reached another stage in its evolution. it is no longer bound to just one form, attached to just one author (but not for the first time in human history). it can be the image of a meme, shared by thousands around the internet, acquiring new meaning in each context; or it can be a vlog which consists of someone reciting beowulf in the original old english. the form and material of the text contributes to its meaning, and therefore every change in the text’s material body produces new meaning. this re-mediation is also a form of translation: text that originated in one form is translated into another form, thereby creating a new context in which the reader can forge a relationship with it, and provide it with a unique meaning. this was our foundation for the final step of our translation: rewriting bongiovanni’s poems as 180-character tweets, released as responses to petrarca tweets already created by the oregon petrarch open book project. this is the progenitor of our translation project. initiated at the university of oregon by lollini, it is a hypertext and digital tool created for the purpose of facilitating new ways of studying and teaching petrarch’s canzoniere “in their making, evolution, and afterlife in translations, rewritings, and intersemiotic transpositions” (lollini “return” 72). the website contains many different methods for reading this text – critical editions, manuscripts, incunabula, and many different rewritings including a twitter version – one tweet for each of the 366 sonnets and songs. the opob’s point of departure is the idea that the canzoniere, from its inception, was always a work-in-progress, a living project, a text that was never stable at any point in its life. petrarch continued to revise and edit his masterwork up until his death. therefore, that others continue to rewrite and revise this text is not a destructive process, but a creative one that honors the original author’s artistic and methodological approach; this is true as much for the petrarchan women poets of the 17th and 18th centuries, as for contemporary reading and writing that engages with this form. cyberspace is not merely the vessel through which the text is transmitted to the reader, but it is an active medium in the text’s creation. in creating a “twitterature” version of bongiovanni’s work, our goal was twofold: first, to make it a ‘living text’ in the 21st century sense of the phrase – that is, interactive, able to appeal to a wider audience than the printed version would be likely to have, and second, to engage with hypertext. “the digital environment provided by web browsers and hypertext facilitates a multimodal and discontinuous kind of reading” (lollini “circles” 10). thus, whereas linear patterns of thought associated with print impose narrowness and decontextualization in our reading and writing, hypertext destroys the physical isolation of texts, thereby embodying the derridean idea of the borderless text (152-153), enabling nonlinear practices. to place the text in a hypertext environment such as the opob and then disseminating it through twitter is to lift the borders from the text and allow a nonlinear reading of the poems that even allows the reader to become a kind of co-author; every comment and retweet is another transposition. in translating and remediating pellegra bongiovanni’s work, our intention is to make visible for the first time in english her unique way of engaging the petrarchan poetic tradition, as well as to empower her female voice to make what has been traditionally a monologic meditation on love, into a dialogue between lovers/writers. we also aim to bring her voice closer to a modern audience by rewriting it for an interactive digital platform, which as we have seen is just the most recent step in the ongoing, living project that is petrarchan literature. humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 96 3. francesco, you’ve got mail – the movie. literary criticism through cinema. gerardo pisacane in this section of our critical paper, we investigate the pros and cons of the third cinematic remediation of our project, francesco, you’ve got mail, intending to answer the following questions. first, what does making a short film on pellegra bongiovanni’s responses to petrarca’s poems entail? namely, what does our short movie neglect to narrate in comparison with the original sonnets and highlight instead? second, and more importantly, how does our cinematic remediation embody the changes that the digital era has been producing on our way to approach and study literary works? in order to dig into the details of francesco, you’ve got mail and answer the questions raised, i believe that a broader discussion on cinema as a medium is necessary to better understand the core of our project. i propose an analysis that takes into account both the effects on social consciousness and changes in human perception that are introduced by cinema. whereas the study on the effects of cinema builds on marshall mcluhan’s maxim that “the medium is the message” – and it sheds light on the impacts that the seventh art brings about apart from its content, – the analyses of the changes of cinema is based on the concept of remediation. in francesco, you’ve got mail, the remediation is twofold, and it affects both the literary work by petrarca and bongiovanni, and the medium. on the one hand, the remediation of the literary work embodies the cinematic transposition of the twitter dialogue that we produced earlier based on the responses to petrarca's sonnets by bongiovanni. on the other hand, the remediation concerning the medium represents what bolter and gruisin define as “the way in which one medium is seen by our culture as reforming or improving upon another” (59). here, the improvement does not only point to the cultural and technical legacy that cinema inherited from previous media such as painting and photography but also the digital changes that films have been going through. as a matter of fact, our short movie represents a digital product which further complicates the discourse on remediation. 3.1 remediating our body with cinema as mcluhan points out in his understanding media, each medium is capable of affecting both cultural practices and social behaviors of a community. the introduction of the railway, for example, revolutionized not only transportation but also cities’ morphology, facilitating urbanization and development. as a consequence, even the social interactions among individuals changed as people started to move and gather more dynamically. taking into account the effects of media, one could ask how cinema as a medium has changed people and society? mcluhan already provides us with valuable insight to illustrate the effects of cinema on our lives, theorizing the idea of the medium as an extension of our body. “as an extension and expediter of the sense life, any medium at once affects the entire field of the senses” (55). in the case of movies, close up and extreme close-up confirm mcluhan’s theory. both a close-up and an extreme close up show a subject in detail and from close range. for instance, through an extreme close up of an eye, the viewers can distinctly discern the eye’s iris in a way they would not be able to do only with the help of human sight. functioning as a body extension, the medium of cinema, therefore, enhances viewers’ sight. in a broader sense, the body’s extension argued by mcluhan also has to do with the collective consciousness of a society. mcluhan highlights that back in the golden age of movie stars, actors and http://journals.oregondigital.org/index.php/hsda/article/view/4639/4514 humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 97 actresses from hollywood films served as trendsetters and influencers in the world of beauty, fashion, and home design. as a consequence, commercials and ads would resemble well-known movie scenes in order to be performative and urge consumers to buy the advertised products. french philosopher and sociologist edgar morin offers perceptive insights on the effects of cinema on the collective consciousness. in his in l’esprit du temps which aims to examine mass culture and its outcomes on society, morin argues that hollywood cinema has spread all over the world the paradigm of americanness and its values, such as middle-class lifestyle, happy endings, leisure, youth, and hypermasculinity (124). as soon as hollywood movies became popular, those values started to take root in western society, shaping our way of thinking as well as our consumption habits. following morin’s idea of social imaginary affected by cinema, we claim that the title of our project francesco, you’ve got mail, for example, brings automatically to mind the concept of online dating since it is a reference to the rather popular movie you’ve got mail.1 the cinematic quote serves precisely to engage the viewers, exploiting a relatively famous hint. going back to the enhancement of the human body through media, cinema strengthens and expands the senses of vision and hearing also because it enables viewers to go back and forth within a story and to be in two places at the same time. the possibilities of traveling both through time and space are due to the practice of editing. the editing consists of assembling separate cinematic sequences that happen in different moments and spaces. by doing so, the editing not only takes to extremes the fundamental distinction between story and plot of a film, but it also displays the cinema’s faculty to expand human senses. whereas the story represents both events and actions of a film, the plot pertains to how the movie narrates the facts. the technique of flashbacks and cross-cutting are good examples of how editing works to fulfill an engaging plot. if a flashback unveils previous events of a narrative, thus enabling viewers to travel through time, the cross-cutting alternates on the screen two different actions that occur in two different locations, allowing spectators to go across places. being able to cross more than one space and time in the movie’s narrative because of the editing proves that during a film screening, viewers oversee and overhear the narrated events and hence confirm the general idea of the human senses’ enhancement through media. that augmentation of senses is even more effective in francesco, you've got mail since the plot interweaves words and stories from different centuries. it does so also because the encounters between digital and cinema brings the body extension that mcluhan connects to media to an even more spectacular improvement with a cognitive dimension. for instance, consider how sharply viewers can notice the details of a landscape thanks to high resolution images. that is why in the next paragraph, i take into account george landow’s reflections on digital cinema explaining how they worked as a remarkably hermeneutical and technical tool to construct our short movie. 3.2 immediacy of francesco, you’ve got mail in his hypertext 3.0, george landow claims that computer technology has profoundly transformed cinema both in the process of shooting and editing. as landow explains, the digital remediation of the seventh art has generally improved the quality of the image and the visual experience. leaving aside the important and broader debate on the consequences, not always “positive”, of the digital 1 you’ve got mail is a mainstream film from 1990s, whose plot pivots on a passionate and anonymous internet romance between the two protagonists. humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 98 revolution on cinema, here, i want to argue that by improving images' standard, digitalization also contributed to reinforcing the sense of immediacy in cinema. i am using here the term immediacy as understood by bolter and grusin. namely, it refers to the ability that each medium has to make its presence disappear while conveying a message in order to give its addressee the chance to perceive only the “unmediated” content. bolter and grusin also claim that immediacy is not only a prerogative of new and digital media: “a painting by the seventeenth-century artist pieter saenredam, a photograph by edward weston, and a computer system for virtual reality are different in many important ways, but they are all attempts to achieve immediacy by ignoring or denying the presence of the medium and the act of mediation” (11). following bolter and grusin's argument, high-quality digital images convey nowadays a sense of even more powerful immediacy because of their outstanding verisimilitude. in the logic of immediacy that digital cinema aims to pursue, it is furthermore possible to consider as valid tools computer-manipulated images, special effects, and graphics, which are all constitutive of the digital editing and contribute to making viewing experience extremely engaging. also, when it comes to our film project, they provided us with insights that turned out critical to the construction of our cinematic remediation. in francesco, you've got mail, for instance, the digital editing was fundamental to put francesco, laura and pellegra, the three main characters of an unrequited love story, in dialogue with one another. in the movie, francesco and laura ‘cybermeet’ on tinder. here, it is worthwhile to highlight that the use of the dating app tinder functions, as morin would argue, as a mass-cultural reference that the plot employs as a narrative element to catch viewers' attention. given the rise of dating apps these days2, in fact, it is reasonable to believe that our francesco, you've got mail might have more chances to convey the remediation of the canzoniere to millennials by merging the relation between francesco and laura with the widespread practice of online dating. however, the use of tinder works at another level of remediation as well. i want to claim that staging the meeting on tinder embodies our attempt to recreate on screen the patterns of the first intertextual interaction that occurred between petrarca and bongiovanni. in reality, although the two poets never met in person, they nonetheless did virtually on paper as the sicilian writer studied and replied to the original poems of the canzoniere. in a way, it can be argued that bongiovanni's remediation of petrarca's poems is as virtual as to communicate on dating apps for two strangers. both forms of information exchange are displayed, accessed, and collected by a medium. while in the case of petrarca and bongiovanni that medium is the book, whether it is manuscript or printed, in our cinematic remediation it turns to be the smartphone. the smartphone's choice, as a medium, cannot be considered accidental since it is nothing but the quintessence of the digital landscape where the text has become so fluid that triggers a potentially infinite mode of remediation. as landow claims, “digital text is always open, unborded, unfinished and unfinishable capable of infinite extension” (landow, 196). that openness of the digital text depends on its replicability. on the internet, users can find texts that they will adapt to their needs and reshare with such simplicity never experienced this way by any medium before. that is precisely why there was no better medium than smartphone to express the replicability of the text already practiced, on paper, by bongiovanni. 2 for example, “love and dating after the tinder revolution” at https://www.bbc.com/news/business-42988025. humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 99 in francesco, you've got mail, the emphasis on virtuality becomes then the leitmotif of the entire plot. right after the match on tinder, francesco starts messaging laura with poetic loving words. laura, however, does not requite francesco's feelings, nor is she willing to meet him in person. eventually, she confides in her best friend pellegra, asking for help. as a result, in order to rescue laura, pellegra decides to catfish francesco, pretending to be laura and responding to francesco's messages. in the end, francesco will never meet in person either laura or pellegra, except for the last scene in which he bumps into the sicilian poet. although pellegra knows who exactly francesco is, francesco ignores her since he never made her acquaintance. in the same way, the author of the canzoniere never came across the sicilian poet because of the centuries that separate them, yet bongiovanni knew petrarca very well through his poems. despite the fact that the characters never meet in person, the plot still intertwines the three protagonists’ storylines so that viewers watch live the give and take between francesco and pellegra (alias laura). the plot's aim is, once again, to preserve the pattern of the intermedial exchange that involved the two original poets. as briante discussed above, bongiovanni gives voice through her rewriting to the character of laura, who never speaks within petrarca's sonnets. she imitates petrarca's poetic style, echoes his words, and thus corroborates in a way the afterlife of the canzoniere. looking at the paradigm of bongiovanni's remediation, the viewers can understand then why, for example, our cinematic pellegra takes the floor and performs as laura or why francesco can never acknowledge her. from a cinematic perspective, i want to point out that the digital remediation of cinema turned to be a fundamental factor in carrying out our intention to be as faithful as possible to the remediation of pellegra, which is specifically the input of our entire project. digital editing, special effects, and graphics, as far as simplistic they might appear in our short movie, helped to display the virtual encounter of the previous remediation. in detail, what puts in dialogue the characters of our story are both cross-cutting editing and on-screen text messages. the cross-cutting follows the paradigm of the continuity editing, which represents in cinema the coherent juxtaposition of shots so as to avoid misleading interruptions or confusing incongruences in both sequence and storytelling. in our short movie, the continuity editing connects, for example, the scenes that present the sender francesco and the addressee pellegra while they exchange messages. to understand the coherence that the continuity editing demands, for example, consider that where the shot a displays francesco texting, the shot b needs to report on screen the recipient of his message. perhaps, he is merely navigating on the internet or swiping left on tinder. if so, those images will be following the frame a. in short, no matter what, in the continuity editing, each action visually has to correspond to its reaction. on the other hand, even the on-screen text messages which consist of part of the twitter series produced in the second remediation intend to highlight the protagonists' correspondence. by working as cinematic dialogues staging the characters' verses, they show without filters the most intimate thoughts of two potential lovers. given the specificities of cross-cutting editing and on-screen text messages, it goes without saying that both make viewers feel as if they participated live in the give and take between francesco and pellegra. that feeling embodies precisely the immediacy discussed above when people engage in the message overlooking the medium and its negotiation. in francesco, you've got mail, i want to claim that the message threads together two narratives, both petrarca's sonnets and bongiovanni's responses, humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 100 presenting them as if they were happening at once. after all, it is not different from what bongiovanni did when she replied to petrarca's verses as if he could read her words. moreover, it is not different from what we made petrarca and pellegra do on twitter either, staging an online interaction between their 'fake' profiles. reasonably, the added value of our short movie is in the simultaneity of the message that it conveys. in other words, while for the twitter thread, for instance, users must visit either petrarca's profile or pellegra's, and scroll twitter's wall in order to participate in their exchange, our movie offers a selection of their words on one pixelated surface at the same time. although our video might seem to address a more traditional, passive audience given the absence of hypermedia links, however, i want to point out that our movies also include in the credits a barcode that redirects the active viewers to the opob page and petrarca and pellegra’s twitter profiles simply by taking a picture with their phone. by doing so, the movie proves to have in mind as an ideal audience, the wreader. the term, coined by george landow, suggests that readers nowadays consume data but yet improve it with the aim to share with the collective community. following landow’s idea, therefore, our viewer will not only watch francesco, you've got mail, but also potentially reposts, retweets, and thus remediates our content. by calling to action our ideal audience through that barcode, in a way, our movie manifests another significant effect that the digital had on the seventh art and that landow defines as hypertext cinema. he points to the hypertext narrative in the digital movies, showing how some films allow viewers even to lead the movie’s story. they do so demanding the viewers’ interaction so that the story can go on. by clicking either a window or another appeared on the screen at some point in the narration, the audience will determine the plot twists. certainly, we are not asking viewers to lead our movie’s narrative, and our unsophisticated expertise in digital techniques did not permit us to produce a real example of hypertext cinema. however, by inviting them to navigate the opob and the twitter profiles after watching, we expect them to interact with a hypertext that exceeds the confines of our cinematic message and dialog with both the canzoniere and bongiovanni’s remediation with the hope that they might continue a potentially unfinishable story. 3.3 hypermediacy of francesco, you’ve got mail when analyzing the concept of remediation that inevitably determines the medium’s nature, one must also bear in mind the principle of hypermediacy that bolter and grusin define as a medium that remediates another. it is precisely the combination of two or more media in one that represents hypermediacy. this process is not as recent as one might think. for instance, consider how incunabula included illustrations to supplement the written words back in the 1500’s. what ensues from bolter and grusin’s analyses is also that media must be considered as an entanglement of social, economic, aesthetic and cultural meanings that denote a community: “media have the same claim to reality as more tangible cultural artifacts; photographs, films, and computer applications are as real as airplanes and buildings” (19). taking as its starting point the legitimacy of media to be examined as cultural products, i want to put in dialogue our francesco, you've got mail with the concept of hypermediacy in this last paragraph to finally highlight that the complexity behind our cinematic product makes it not less valuable than any close reading in the realm of literary criticism. humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 101 in general, hypermediacy echoes mcluhan’s idea that any medium embeds other media’s content as well. he conceptualizes that “[t]he content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph” (23). in cinema, it is clear that such an idea suggests something more than a movie can be based on a literary work. indeed, mcluhan indicates that each medium potentially borrows and develops other media’s specificities. following this principle of entanglement, one should consider cinema, for instance, as the encounter of oral literature, writing, photography, and digital among other things. first, cinema echoes oral literature considering that a movie works, in a way, as an ancient storyteller. however, storytelling and orality had already undergone another substantial remediation by radio in the 20th century. as a consequence, one could argue that cinema remediated radio as well since we might think of the voiceover that some movies adopt as the remediation of radio host’s talks. second, cinema incorporates writing. indeed, any movie is, before being the practice of filming, a screenplay in which the written (and digitalized) word describes story, characters, and setting. third, cinema is grounded in photography's techniques such as light and perspective, which, in turn, embodies the specificities of painting. finally, i have already discussed above the encounter between the digital and cinema, and its outcomes, such as digital editing, special effects, and graphics on the one hand, and the development of hypertext narrative on the other. to sum up, therefore, cinema represents a marvelous example of what bolter and grusin call hypermediacy, a multilayered work of art, where each layer incorporates languages and techniques borrowed from another previous medium based on a principle of aggregation with no exclusion. in our short movie, hypermediacy is easy to find in both medium and content. as regards medium, hypermediacy takes place in three forms. first, the on-screen messages between the characters recall the massive return of writing that is affecting our identity as both reader and writer to the point that we embody the figure of wreader. second, the on-screen text messages which use the distinguishable interface of tinder also highlight the presence of the phone. as mentioned before, the phone has become the embodiment of the digital and its infinite possibilities, including looking for a soulmate. third, the use of soundtrack with the choice of specific songs whose lyrics function as lines between the characters, thus compensating the lack of dialogues. each song conveys a particular meaning, which represents one semantic layer within the multifaceted message. following the hypertext’s principle of entanglement, the songs cannot be understood without the images and vice versa. however, in our video, hypermediacy goes even further and follows jill nelmes’s definition of film. as nelmes states: film is a linguistic as well as a visual medium [...] since movies have linguistic communication through the presence of dialogue or voiceover on the soundtrack, as well as the inclusion of printed text within the image (such as intertitles, shots of newspapers, books, letters). (80) some shots of francesco, you’ve got mail display the presence of more than one medium. one sequence in particular emphasizes hypermediacy very well, staging together not one but five media on the screen: on the one hand, books and a blackboard which are both references to the writing, on the other, a phone, laptop, and television which represent the advent of digital media. finally, hypermediacy also concerns the content of our cinematic product. francesco, you've got mail, its story and words derive from the collective criticism, circulation of ideas, and production of new meanings first carried on by the people of the opob project. later on, the meanings produced humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 102 by previous readers/wreaders encountered our team’s aim to negotiate their canzoniere’s remediation and bongiovanni’s. our movie is the latest stage of very long remediation that pass through several media, such as vellum manuscript, paper, digital writing, cinema and new media, and several play of interpretations. all this work would have not been possible without the collective intelligence made possible by the creative use of the internet. as a matter of fact, our movie is only the latest result of a new digital literary criticism that is based on virtual community's labor. here, i am referring to the wreader who is, as mentioned before, the ideal audience addressed by our cinematic remediation. the wreader is the ideal player within what pierre levy defines as cosmopedia, namely, a cybernetic space that not only [...] “makes available to the collective intellect all of the pertinent knowledge available to it at a given moment, but it also serves as a site of collective discussion, negotiation, and development” (217). it is worthwhile noting that the way levy conceives cosmopedia makes all of its users all potentially critical thinkers and of the internet the ideal place for critical analyses. this turning point into the reader’s outline is crucial within the discourse of literary criticism anchored in the digital environment since it deterritorializes knowledge and facilitates a potentially infinite as well as democratic circulation of ideas and meanings without which our movie could have never come to life. going back to the questions that i raised at the beginning of this section, i want to conclude emphasizing that our movie does not diminish neither petrarca’s sonnets nor bongiovanni’s responses. in the same way, bongiovanni was able through her remediation to perpetuate the afterlife of the canzoniere providing us with different readings of the text, i believe that francesco, you’ve got mail is capable of enriching the virtual conversation that occurred between the two poets. the movie does so acknowledging her as a poet and displaying her words through a cinematic validation. despite that some critics might consider despicable the televisual transposition we made of bongiovanni’s poems, i want to claim that francesco, you’ve got mail must be merely understood as another reading of the literary work; a reading that we made from distant range, as the etymology of the word televisual itself suggests. perhaps only by distancing oneself from the text can one glimpse different facets of it. bongiovanni did so too, as she was able to portray a silent laura to whom she decided to give voice. as bongiovanni ‘dared’ to respond to the untouchable petrarca, we ‘dared’ to give voice, through a cinematic product, to a forgotten female poet. project conclusion in one of her sonnets, pellegra bongiovanni writes, “my admiration is so great in these immortal pages/ that if my recitation did not contain fault/i would amaze the world without art.” we can say the same, for in our translations and remediations, we have attempted to portray our admiration for an artist whose work has not been sufficiently appreciated. the translation of her sonnets from italian into english, and then the transformation of sonnets into tweets, has restored the dialogue form of the work’s original printed version, with the aim of highlighting her own rewriting of petrarca and laura “love story” that finally gives voice to the muse, and gives solid presence to the woman who for so long was only an objectified image with no agency. bongiovanni not only presented us with a new characterization of laura, she also remediated petrarca by creating a retelling of the story. although she followed petrarca’s style of writing, she also altered the tradition of petrarchism itself by making it a dialogue between two writers/poets, not just between a man and a woman, thus making her petrarca’s equal. she claims her own authority as poet and as humanist independently of her humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 103 identity as a woman (and thus compelled to speak on behalf of laura) and this sets her apart from other petrarchists who only imitate his style. in this sense, bongiovanni anticipated how remediation works in placing a previous text in a new context but also repurposing the text to create new meaning. “the goal of remediation is to refashion or rehabilitate other media. furthermore, because all mediations are both real and mediations of the real, remediation can also be understood as a process of reforming reality as well” (bolter & grusin 56). bongiovanni reformed the idea of being a female in the petrarchan tradition – which refers to both refiguring the character of laura, and to being a woman writing poems in the style of petrarca. in our project, we are following bongiovanni’s example of refashioning the petrarchan tradition by translating her remediation into both a digital language and audiovisual content, thereby engaging a digital wreadership. within the larger field of literary criticism, texts cannot be understood as isolated from other texts, and interpretation of text is not a matter of uncovering a hidden ‘meaning’. rather, just as hermeneutic interpretation compels us to understand texts in their relation to other texts and as historically located documents, the same can be said of remediation in the digital era: meaning is created in the relationship between reader and text, and in the relationship between text and other texts (broadened to include film, music, song lyrics, social media posts, tags, etc.). this is the theory behind hypertext. as pierre lévy states, “a conventional linear text, even digitized, can’t be read as a true hypertext, or database, or a system that will automatically create texts as a function of interactions fed by the reader” (lévy 50). thus, we as readers are also writers in the sense that we produce text in our interactions with hypertext. “we could consider the contemporary trend towards the hypertextualization of documents as a movement toward indistinctness, the blending of the functions of reading and writing…in the hypertext every act of reading is an act of writing” (lévy 58). this idea, in a broader sense, makes clearer the connections between texts, and the entanglements between reader and writer, which defines that new space of knowledge that levy names ‘cosmopedia’. in the cosmopedia, every information becomes potentially accessible to every participant in the collectivity, and each information becomes the result of both negotiation and developments. our remediations, in conclusion, continue to honor the petrarchan tradition, hopefully inspiring further reading and perhaps future remediations of both bongiovanni and petrarca, by bringing them into the 21st century and returning to a method of imitation as tribute, and reading as re-writing and re-creation. works cited abbadessa, emanuela . “la palermitana che diede voce alla laura di petrarca” 15 jan 2015, la repubblica.it, web: https://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2015/01/15/lapalermitana-che-diede-voce-alla-laura-di-petrarcapalermo11.html alonso, dámaso. la 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in alcuni versi supera il petrarca” n1/2017, rel, unistrapg https://www.unistrapg.it/it/rel/articoli/intervista-al-prof-robertofedi-pellegra-bongiovanni-alcuni-versi-supera-il-petrarca. quadrio, francesco saverio. della storia e della ragione d'ogni poesia, bologna: pisarri, 1739-44. russo, luigi. il petrarca e il petrarchismo. “belfagor”, ix, 5. 1954, web: ww.jstor.org/stable/26111971. scinà, domenico. prospetto della storia letteraria di sicilia nel secolo decimottavo, palermo: officio tip. lo bianco, 1859. spallicci, giuseppe. cenni biografici di alcune donne illustri italiane operetta, proposta come libro di lettura nei collegi e nelle scuole femminili, palermo: l. pedone lauriel, 1873. venuti, lawrence. the translator’s invisibility: a history of translation. routledge, new york, ny, 1995 appendix translation of pellegra bongiovanni’s risposte di madonna laura alle rime di messer francesco petrarca, in nome della medesima the following translation includes 23 sonnets (n°1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6; 9; 14; 28; 46; 58; 63; 66; 67; 73; 74; 79; 85; 96; 109; 195; 196; 198) and a madrigal (n°99). from n°46 to n°198, the poems present double numbering: the first number refers to pellegra’s poem, the second one refers to the exact number of petrarca’s poem of reference, as numbered in his rvf. the numbering follows the order of fredi and crivelli’s critical edition of the risposte. in the first edition of her risposte, pellegra published petrarca’s poems side by side with her poems using progressive numbering, while fredi and crivelli respected the original numbers of petrarca’s canzoniere. we decided to maintain the structure of the italian sonnets, made by two quatrains and two tercets, and to create a system of rhymes and rhythm less traditional but more appealing to modern e-readers. petrarca’s sonnets are not included in this appendix, but they can be read on the opob database. also, we are currently digitizing the full text of the pellegra’s 1762 original edition of the risposte. it will be available in the opob in 2020. *** https://www.unistrapg.it/it/rel/articoli/intervista-al-prof-roberto-fedi-pellegra-bongiovanni-alcuni-versi-supera-il-petrarca https://www.unistrapg.it/it/rel/articoli/intervista-al-prof-roberto-fedi-pellegra-bongiovanni-alcuni-versi-supera-il-petrarca humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 106 responses in the name of madonna laura to the poems of messer francesco petrarca translated by elisa briante, marena lear, and gerardo pisacane 1. i hear the sound of scattered rhymes, that from your vibrant heart you sent, when, dazzled by love’s tricks, you made me appear what i am not: and so i ponder: why blame me for your pain? if i was the innocent cause of your love, why should i ask forgiveness? for heaven knows, and the whole world too: it was only you who often raved; it was not i, of myself i am not ashamed; i ask for mercy, for i know what is the fruit of lovers, i know love, and i see clearly: he is not sweet, or only sweet in dreams. 2. it was not, no matter what you think, love’s revenge against your many wrongs; and if he took his golden bow in hand like a man preparing to fight for victory he did not tame the virtue barricaded within, which had until then been defending you, and which made the mortal arrow fall uselessly through your heart. and even if he won this last assault, within you there remains such strength, and space – you can still arm yourself against the victor. let him despair who cannot obtain virtue from heaven, and who, caught in the harsh torments of love, says: i could, but love will not help me. humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 107 3. the first time your cheek paled when you fixed your eyes on mine, and on my soul love assaulted us both, but i protected myself – he ensnared you but did not bind me. i hastened to protect my heart, remembering the day our mighty maker suffered death, and our woes and obstructions to happiness began. so love, finding neither unarmed, did not open a passage to the heart and did not await me at the gate; but turned to you to give him justice – you, who were in such a perilous state – and to me love never even showed his bow. 4. nature and art have long toiled, investing all their noble mastery, to make, in this and in the other sphere, heaven’s only soul on earth, the city of mars, faithful guardian of the holy scriptures, through which the higher truth was revealed to the world: in choosing it for peter’s post, heaven willed it to be a part of its immeasurable power. god showed less mercy to arezzo, but it was raised to a glorious state when he made it your birthplace; thus heaven and nature, who have given it such a sublime honor, now always give thanks, for with you, their glory to the world was born. humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 108 5. how can i believe that love has already ruled you so harshly, that he, giving you no hope for freedom, tightly binds you in his snare? if your name has the sound of freedom, and then escape follows? facing his strength, you can say to love: with all honor, i frankly can escape your arrows! unfurl, then, the battle flag; and beneath it gather every virtue for the lofty endeavor so becoming of you. but if your cowardly heart disdains to use its strength, never will the wreath of apollo crown your head. 6. stop, o my heart, the unjust and vain desire to follow my soul, which turns and flees: it is surrendering too far to love’s cure to indulge my fiery passion. when i send my soul the sweet sights of my eyes, when pain speaks, oh! it does not hear me; yet in running to it, you cannot turn, mad heart! you should be reluctant. what sour fruit is harvested from a sweet love! and yet i give myself to him, seeing to what torture it leads me. but who could ever reap something better from it? oh, for seeing another’s despair deprives one of hope, instead of giving comfort. humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 109 9. neither the sun’s warmth, nor the shadow’s cold, have extinguished in you that sweet, errant desire for love that releases your heart from impure desires, which come from thoughts concealed inside. but the soul can only be free when the body has failed. your gazes, sighs, and fickle face made the force of your flames all too clear to my soul; thus it was fear that made me veil my breast and face and made me veil the willing gaze that gathers into itself if the beauty is taken away from your fervent eyes. do not blame the veil – it is not the sun or the cold i seek protection from, but your passion; it intimidates me and clouds my eyes. 14. if the white turtle dove disdains its nest when the winter season ends, he leaves his little mate astounded, crying, missing her companion, she then moves her wings and to her partner’s side (for she wants to spend her whole life with him) she clings, and they help each other fly; thus their strength never tires; like her, i am stunned, and i follow my beautiful desire if he goes away from me – he, my angel of eternal hope, he is my beloved, and i know i am his – i would never fly to heaven with another, for in him alone resides sweetness, and true virtue. humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 110 28. at least you can bring your moist eyes and slow steps to the solitary fields, without your chest burning to keep the lips from their intention, so that the air is not imprinted with the sound of sighs, but on this crowded earth, where should i go to save myself from the gaze of idle people? for my wan eyes and lifeless face make clear how much i am feigning, and i flush. while caves, mountains, and beaches echo with your scattered, bitter-tempered odes; i laugh, and move none to pity. even the wild souls of plants, sensing love, always honor it but plebeians who experience it only mock. 46. (56.) strong desire destroys reason so much it leaves man to his own devices: and so from you, even memory flees, since you forgot what i have promised you. is the flame for you that burns me lessened now that i live with my soul so close to you? and may the burning heart’s roar not lessen now that some ice has been set on it? to make your beloved fall in love is the greatest good that makes a happy love life: to desire and hope for something else is illicit. a less graceful thought never originates in the mind, but in a heart emptied of honesty; compliant with neither pity nor courtesy. humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 111 58. (69.) did your promptly followed advice release me, o love? being faithful – what was it worth? if my pity, if other false voices, only trapped me, as prey in your fierce talon. but this pain no longer bewilders me, for you never cared for firmness as the sea never cared for the foam that salts the waves, or the whirlwind for the lily it tears from the field. yet i will take the highest alpine path, and i will not leave the unstable waves, until i stop the errant pilgrim, for i know well where he goes, and whence he comes, he, who guides my destiny; nothing is ever hidden from the eyes of love. 63. (74.) when i see you, when i think of you, oh how i am all alive in you and dead in me, life becomes uncertain, and i abandon the heavy burden of my pain. and now i reflect not on the face, nor the hair, nor the sweet gaze, nor the hand, but i ponder the divine beauty, and the sweet sound, that forms the honored name inside my heart. and beyond this earth, freed thoughts turn to contemplate him from whence one cannot go with mortal steps. my admiration is so great in these immortal pages that if my recitation did not contain fault i would amaze the world without art. humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 112 66. (77.) even if he kept his thoughts, kept his gaze fixed, invoking the counsel of intellect and art, apelle himself only one part could depict of the beauty that has conquered my heart. only i, thanks to his grace, can yearn to observe side to side the beauty of paradise and faintly outline on the page the graceful ideal i saw within that eternal face. it’s one thing to see how the image shines in heaven, another to see it encircled by us like the sun by clouds, in a terrestrial veil; but not even you, my soul, can portray him for admiration freezes you just thinking about his eyes. 67. (78.) the concepts that simon colored with said style had humbler ambitions for he knew that his fine art could never acquire the inspiration of voice and intellect. and even if he could have placed within my chest that part, neither mortal nor base, the resemblance would have been poor and i would have been different from my true form. i live in your soul and ponder it and even if it is through my body that i speak, and listen, my senses do not reach my spirit. do not envy pygmalion, because into stone, into woman, and into many other forms, i am transformed against my will. humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 113 73. (84.) if weeping can deaden you, o passionate heart, then we will cry: but if pain sustains the flames, crying is of just as much use as your engendering of error. at least, love is vented through weeping, but the cries surge from within me, reaching my eyes; i, who am ever burning and bereft of hope because as soon as hope is born, it dies: so if we both have equal burdens, without hope, without the sight of the beloved why do we greedily keep hold of life? because cruel love, who troubles and grieves us, prevents our death; out of our uncommon pain, love, the ingrate, acquires life. 74. (85.) o cold fear, why do you still come after the night, to muddy my day, oh why do i always turn and turn my mind to that thought which stabs my heart the most? i seem to hear the fleeting hour tell me: your beloved, who is far from you, now goes to another beauty adorned with superior grace and so the one falls in love with the other and after staying together in contemplation, one stays, and so the other goes leaving that heart there which i yearn for and love in vain. o fierce desperation defeats me, and if love lives well, hope is dead, because, more than life, i long for death. humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 114 79. (90.) my desires were free, my thoughts were scattered love had not yet trapped me in his web, he, whose fires burned inside many minds, had for me scarce effect. when within me a strange change took place and dying, i felt i was reborn, and that pleasure which i had never tasted i drank in through my eyes, and, astonished, i was burned, when you, who in appearance are much more than a mortal man, assaulted me, armed with words for defeating beasts, not merely a human soul. and you assail me with the sweetness of your brow, the double suns that brand my heart, which neither art, nor time, can heal. 85. (100.) when the dawn approaches the sun can be seen turning from the first hour to survey the ninth; in the time when the wind is quiet, and the breeze caresses us more than it wounds; when the night sits in highest heaven, and the soul reasons with ghosts, when for the occasion – to awaken the pain of every person – evening rushes to its feet; i am always troubled by that fatal love, which brings to mind the manner, the place, the year, when, how, and where the wounds came to be. oh sour memories that stick in my mind and lacerate my heart, which loves – betrayed again – those two dim lights. humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 115 96. (116.) so alive is the pleasure, such is the sweetness my thoughts draw from your virtue, that i would contemplate forever your inner angelic beauty. and so accustomed is the soul to subsisting on the sweetest qualities of your virtue, its mind rapt, it despises every other good, every other care. of circling round and round the divine ray, thoughts never tire, nor is love sated, nor desire slowed. but happier i will be if shadows and stones do not deprive the eyes of the bright day, and my gaze could still be part of the good. 99. (121.) the woman who is mistress of herself is not a slave to love, and the man who cares not for a woman’s love does not risk his own. i know not for how long one can remain safe, who has for a habergeon only a fragile skirt, who wears as a helmet only a grass wreath; whosoever was sure of her virtue, can tell of her defeat, and the wounds she maintains. i do not want to expose myself to that ungodly arrow, that stings me all the more when i struggle for revenge. 109. (132.) i know love is the cause of this delirium i feel: i know it is for him that i prepare to live like someone who slowly drinks a mortal poison, and dies without suffering death’s torment. i do not lament because of him, for torment is not worthy of him; it is only i who transform his good into bad, who freely consent to my worst. humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 116 i want, even if my will pains me, i fear the peril of the afflicted boat, and i avoid the port, even forgetting how to steer. even so, this weight, this burden of the spirit, i will carry as long as i am able, whether it be summer, spring, fall, or winter. 195. (223.) love kidnapped me from my dreams to his carriage, so high that the ground seemed black to me; and traversing the ether and the moon, he urged the runners to a faster pace. arriving in the highest skies, to the great lights i narrated my ardor and my pains, one by one, and with my feet at the threshold of fortune, i spoke my defense to her, who listened. moved to pity, “let your pain be nothing,” she answered; and sent dawn’s messenger to awaken my gracious sun. i emerge from sleep, and he who makes my heart rise, he, who livens my eyes with his eyes, comes sweetly to serenade my soul. 196. (224.) if in your presence i assume a pleased aspect, civil only to you; if my lights brighten with joy to see you wander the labyrinth with me; if, whenever you are near, i have painted love on my pupils, fixed and intent on you; if my cheeks, violated with blush, display the affection with which the heart is tainted; if at your parting what befalls me is what always happens to the sun-following night: humanist studies & the digital age briante, lear & pisacane 6.1 (2019) 117 you are the sun of delight, and i the night of grief; if love is close by in dreams and in waking, so that i always burn and all is torment, one shared cause has this ruin. 198. (226.) i leave the roof, my home, without you, alone i flee to the wood i frequent, to press the footsteps i know by scent printed on my heart by my dear intent. my one delight has passed through here, that cave echoed his tuscan meter, here by his bright eyes the dark was lightened, this sweet grass, those flowers, made him a bed. compassionate love meanwhile portrays your figure to me, to keep partially at bay that desire which keeps me in pain. poor me! so far i went! my happiness relies on dreaming you in these lands, my only joy is this delirium #lauraspeaks: remediations of pellegra bongiovanni’s “risposte” elisa briante, marena lear, and gerardo pisacane introduction 1. voicing laura: pellegra bongiovanni’s challenge 1.1 petrarca and petrarchism in the digital era 1.2 pellegra bongiovanni: life and works 1.3 “riposte di madonna laura” 1.4 the project #lauraspeaks 2. a living text: pellegra bongiovanni’s “risposte” and theories of remediation 2.1 translation as transformation 2.2 a digital poetics 2.3 twitterature and the digital remediation of bongiovanni 3. francesco, you’ve got mail – the movie. literary criticism through cinema. 3.1 remediating our body with cinema 3.2 immediacy of francesco, you’ve got mail 3.3 hypermediacy of francesco, you’ve got mail project conclusion works cited appendix translation of pellegra bongiovanni’s risposte di madonna laura alle rime di messer francesco petrarca, in nome della medesima humanist studies & the digital age, 7.1 (2022) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda/7.1.4 1 after the book, the book? the digital writing experiments of françois bon jeff staiger abstract: while most commentators believe that the print book will survive the advent of the ebook, it is at the same time hard not to think that the fundamental technological changes ushered in by the digital revolution will fail to have profound effects on the forms of the book. arguing that literary forms have always depended on the “material conditions of their enunciation,” the french author françois bon uses historical examples to suggest the book will undergo major, if yet unforeseen, transformations. he maintains that it is urgent for writers to experiment with the possibilities brought about by the digital revolution, lest the actual developments be decided by the commercial interests of large technology entities. in his own experiments with the form of the book in the digital environment -in his “novel” tumulte, which consists of daily blog posts that mix fiction, memoir, criticism, and other genres, and in a series of digital remediations of his early novel, limite -bon imaginatively explores the limits of the concept of the book. yet while these experiments are suggestive, it is less clear that they represent viable avenues for the book’s development, since their main appeal is arguably for scholars and theoreticians. focusing on the means of organization and delivery, and the ontological ambiguities arising from the multiple versions of the same text, bon’s experiments skirt the core power of the book: the sustained arrangement of words that has been the principle means whereby books have conveyed content and sustained intellectual culture. the future of the book the question of the future of the book no longer seems as critical as it did in the nineties and aughts, when digital technology first began to bring every element of the media landscape under its sway. some three decades later, it has become clear that the emergence of e-books does not entail the loss of physical ones. they have rather settled into a kind of patchy coexistence, with different readers preferring different modes for different purposes. the convenience of e-books for looking up information is incontestable, and accordingly libraries’ collections of physical reference books have steadily shrunk while these works have largely migrated online. on the other hand, readers have manifested a distinct preference for print books when it comes to the immersive reading of works in such areas as literature and history. then again, readers of genre fiction have bucked this trend and embraced the electronic format, presumably because it lends itself to a kind of fast, serial reading in which such readers typically engage. nevertheless, and contrary to the canard that a new generation that has grown up with digital technology will be less attached to supposedly outdated forms, college students prefer physical books. such a checkered outcome might well have been expected. according to historians of the book and scholars of media, when new rival media emerge to challenge the old, the result has typically been http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ humanist studies & the digital age staiger 7.1 2022 2 coexistence, not supersession.1 computers and the internet have not replaced television, television did not replace radio or the cinema, photography did not replace painting, although in each case the new technology has had a profound effect on the domain and scope of the old. in any case, the situation of books is otherwise, since the digital option is not a different form of communication but a different vehicle for delivering a form, i.e., writing. perhaps for this reason the same commentators who point out that the coexistence of print and electronic books is in line with historical precedents tend to hedge by adding that print books will continue to be around for the foreseeable future. but that is an interval which has lengthened to sufficient indefiniteness as to have made the question of the book’s survival less acute. it may be worth pausing to consider the implications of this persistence, somewhat scandalous from the standpoint of technological meliorism, in the face of what might seem to be a more convenient alternative. if books are going to be around for a long time to come, it might just be because they have qualities with which the alleged gains of the new medium cannot compete. only when the services performed by the book are conceived in such bald functional terms as the delivery of texts, or the transmission of information, does it seem that the quick dissemination and revisability made possible by e-book are big advantages. but the amenities of the book can be imagined in ways far less utilitarian than those associated with its function as a container for content. as a tangible object with a rich array of aesthetic properties, the book anchors the act of reading in the world, helps makes it more real it by lending it sensory and affective traction in physical sphere, and orients memory and cognition by giving them spatiotemporal purchase. studies have consistently shown that comprehension and retention are higher in print books.2 conditioned as we are by the experience of advances in technology both conspicuous and routine to expect that all of our electronic apparatuses will continue to be improved, readers’ lack of comfort with e-books, at least in the case of the deep reading that has provided the paradigm and ideal of reading in general, can seem like another problem to be solved soon enough by technology. yet what this expectation fails to consider is that there is one crucial dimension of the book, namely its existence as a material object, that by definition can never be replicated in the virtual sphere. the book’s thinghood, a quality no one gave a thought to as long as there was no alternative, may be the decisive factor in a market in which more books are being published and purchased than ever before. it’s a good bet that having bodily existence will never be passé. so, the scandal persists: what appears to be the product of an industrial-age technology has refused to be improved by a technological puissance that has otherwise seemed irresistible. of course, today’s print books are not industrial-age products. as is frequently observed, every step of the publishing process, from composition to typesetting, now relies on digital technology. as jeffrey schnapp puts it, “printed books that 1 the terms are eisenstein’s: “coexistence seems more likely than supersession for some years to come” (divine art, 240). this compatibilist both-and structure is a regular feature of commentary on the issue: thus darnton: “…the electronic book [will] act as a supplement, not a substitute for, gutenberg’s great machine” (77); schnapp: “media revolutions are about realignment, not substitution” (22); hamilton: “we have long been accustomed to the fact that the emergence of one technology in no way necessarily spells the demise of another. medial coexistence has generally been the norm, not the exception.” piper spells out the logic of these formulations even more explicitly: “the question is not one of ‘versus,’ of two single antagonists squaring off in a ring; rather, the question is far more ecological in nature. how will these two different species and their many varieties coexist within the greater ecosystem known as reading?” (xi). 2 see, for example: mizrachi, d, salaz, am, boustany, j, mizrachi, diane, salaz, alicia m, kurbanoglu, serap, boustany, joumana, and rabinowitz, mitchell. “academic reading format preferences and behaviors among university students worldwide: a comparative survey analysis.” plos one. 13.5 (2018): e0197444. web. humanist studies & the digital age staiger 7.1 2022 3 appear superficially similar to those produced half a century ago are now digital in their design and production” (22). but the similarity is more than superficial; it is tactile and ergonomic, functional and visual. while the latest state of technology may be employed to produce books, they are not devices like smart phones or televisions for which technology is an integral part not only of their production, but also of their functioning. of course, as book historians often point out, not only have such physical features of the book as shape, size, material, design, organization, paratexts, fonts and the like continued to undergo changes since its inception, but the means by which books have been made, from letter and steam-powered presses to linotype and present-day computer typesetting, have obviously evolved over the centuries. this observation about the evolution of books, invoked to remind us that in the long view change is constant and inevitable, is rather common in the context of discussions of the future of the book.3 yet the pertinence of this historical view, which constitutes something of an intellectual reflex among scholars in the face of the unpredictable openness of the future, should not be automatically assumed in the present case. the differences of morphology that are significant within the context of the long history of the book as a material artifact are slight in comparison with the complete change of state represented by the transition to e-books. to say that the change from print to electronic is just another in a series of changes in the career of the book is like saying that the difference between a lake and a cloud is no greater than that between a lake and a pond because, after all, they are all bodies of water. moreover, the recognition of the ever-changing nature of the book even before the advent of the digital is at odds with the other lesson from the field of book history mentioned above, namely, that coexistence has been the typical outcome when new media emerged to rival old ones. if print books are going to continue to thrive alongside of digital ones, then they will have retained their identity as books, that is, physical things, in the common acceptation of the term; but if, as the observation about constant change seems to suggest, it is only a matter of time before all books shift to digital modes, then the resulting state of affairs would not be coexistence but supersession after all. if we believe that the book is not going to be supplanted by e-books “for now” – and how long is that now? decades? centuries? and how many centuries are tantamount to an effective forever? – then the question of the future of the book is mainly addressed to the possible transformations of the book in its electronic mode. the question then comes down to: what can e-books do that print books can’t? we already have a fair number of specific answers to this question: they can include links, they can promote non-linear reading through hypertext, they can include other media and connect to troves of supporting documentation that it would be impractical to include within the confines of a single physical book, they can facilitate comparison among versions, they can be readily updated and revised, they can make themselves available to feedback even as they are being composed… these are all new capacities in the career of the book, and yet that they have not carried the day and rendered the print book obsolete attests to the centrality in our experience of the forms of attention whose association with the print book may not be simply adventitious. the concept of the book has been put 3 the tendency among scholars to stress continuity rather than rupture is understandable in light of the zero-sum advocacy that one finds in the popular discussions. schnapp states, “as we catalog some of the current disruptions, it’s important to remember that none of the material, functional, and cultural affordances of the book have ever been fixed and immutable” (25). hamilton contends that “electronic writing, publishing, and reading constitute merely a new chapter in the advancement of a basic technology that has always been designed to register, store, and circulate information” (28). for borsuk, “the book is a fluid artifact whose form and usage have shifted over time under numerous influences: social, financial, and technological.” incontestable in themselves, in the context of discussions of the future of the book such statements do not seem to me to sufficiently acknowledge the magnitude of the change ushered in by the latest “chapter” of the book’s history. humanist studies & the digital age staiger 7.1 2022 4 in play, but how much play is in the concept? how far can the book be stretched and still be a book, that is, still do what five centuries have schooled us to want and need the book to do? after the book for some two decades in both his critical and imaginative writings, the french writer françois bon has conducted a searching engagement with the question of the future of the book. as yet little known in the angloamerican literary world, bon is a major voice in contemporary french literature, whose prolific output includes some twenty novels, theater pieces, books of essays, criticism (rabelais, koltès), rock biographies (the rolling stones, bob dylan, led zeppelin), children’s books, translations (lovecraft, the manifesto uncreative writing by the american poet, kenneth goldsmith), as well as genre-bending works like tumulte, classified as a novel but an amalgam of autobiography, criticism, and fiction. in the late 90s the protean bon began experimenting with online publication on his website, tierslivre, which features blogs, journals, photography, translations, a writing workshop, and digital experiments with the form of the book that will be considered presently. the website has further branched into a publishing venture, tierslivre.net, which publishes the works of bon and other innovative authors in both digital and print editions. the trajectory of bon’s career itself represents an example of the multiple roles available to the author in the digital age. bon’s treats the question of the future of the book most explicitly in his book, après le livre (after the book), which mixes reflections on emerging developments with examinations of a range of historical cases. as bon declares, “there has never been an author or writing (écriture) that can separate itself from the material conditions of its enunciation and reproducibility” (11).4 one could take this as the broadest of truisms – an immaterial writing process would be a contradiction in terms – and yet bon lends it force by deploying a diverse and impressive collection of examples of the ways writing has opportunistically taken shape around different historical expressions of “the material conditions of its enunciation and reproducibility.” bon’s book proposes that the future of the book is not a matter of prediction, but of practice, which is to say, bracingly, that to a considerable extent what becomes of the book is up to us. this optimistic but nuanced sense of agency guides bon’s approach to the question of the future of the book and is one of the chief virtues of his exposition. never deterministic in its presentation of the relationship between technology and writing, après le livre emphasizes the dependence of practices on material circumstances that it variously evokes in their historical particularity while yet leaving room for the ingenuity of individuals who work within those circumstances to create forms of expressions that meet their communicative needs. in turn, the book’s myriad examples from the history of writing bear directly on the present. just as authors have always found opportunities in their technological moment, so too can we adapt to present circumstances. indeed, for bon this is not so much an invitation as an imperative: for as he eloquently observes in the book’s introduction, “for over two decades now we have progressively entrusted the totality of our practices, from the professionally routine to our most private creations, to electronic devices. and with grave risks, as those devices, their software, and the economy of their circulation, are under the monopoly of a few groups for whom art and civilization are of less concern than the stock market and domination” (8).5 for all that, there 4 “il n’y a jamais eu d’auteur ni d’écriture qui puissent se séparer de ses conditions matérielles d’ énonciation ou de reproductibilité” (11). 5 “… depuis deux décennies… nous confions progressivement la totalité de nos usages, depuis les routines humanist studies & the digital age staiger 7.1 2022 5 is wiggle room to invent the forms that take advantage of the possibilities inherent in our interactions with the new technologies. the hortatory cast of bon’s project comes to the fore at the end of the introduction: “our new reading practices are liable to engender their own dense forms, which will not reveal themselves to our imagination except to the extent that we try them out (expérimenterons) with them” (15).6 this is carefully couched: digital technologies offer opportunities for new forms of written expression, but we -and bon’s firstperson plural is nicely inclusive -must discover and actualize them in the course of trials that follow the lead of reading practices already molded by new conditions. the book is open to our experimentation and renovation, bon suggests, because it never has been a stable object. the many historical instances bon evokes après le livre serve to show that there is no sole, monolithic entity corresponding platonically to the idea of “the book,” but only particular instances of books responsive to changing combinations of expressive needs and technological opportunities. his most prominent example of the looseness of the term “book” is baudelaire’s flowers of evil, of which he tallies half a dozen versions and concludes “the principal oeuvre of baudelaire is not a book” and, even more dramatically, “baudelaire did not write flowers of evil”.7 on this account, the book becomes an adventitious receptacle for writings that arrests the ongoing process of composition at what merely happens to be the latest stage of its development, giving the illusion of integrity and finality, where there is only truncated succession. the same logic applies on a larger scale to the oeuvre of kafka, whose letters, notebooks, drafts, journals, published stories, and novels rescued from the destruction he wished for them, comprise “an ensemble without contours” (137).8 the accidents that governed what made it into the kafka canon -who chose, when, according to what principles, and what was lost -bring home the fudging inherent in our conception of the writer’s oeuvre. given the mind’s penchant for thinking in terms of discrete concepts, we want to be able to say what we talk about when refer to baudelaire or kafka is a definite thing. it is unsettling to think that “kafka is a dark mass” or that when we look closely enough at baudelaire’s output, all is “diffraction, cloudiness,” yet how definite an idea of a body of work do we ever have behind the signifier that is an author’s name? (143).9 the arbitrariness of the boundaries of the book, of which baudelaire’s flowers of evil is bon’s chief example, is a property with which he explores in his own digital experiments. another such property, anticipated in certain manifestations of the book in its long history but that can be exploited to an unprecedented degree in the digital realm, is immediacy. in this regard, bon adduces as an ideal for web-writing the example of the 17thcentury author, madame de sévigné, whose eloquent and sage letters from paris to her daughter in provence were copied and read, with de sévigné’s consent, before they even reached their addressee. assembled posthumously -mostly from the copies, the originals not having survived – the letters were published as a book that has become one of the classics of french literature. comparing her writings to that of her contemporary, the memoirist saint-simon, whose works were composed at great intervals after his involvement in the court of louis xiv, bon extols the day-to-day responsiveness of her letters to the intrigues of the court. these letters required distance as a catalyst -de sévigné’s son, placed at the court, did not need daily reports – professionnelles jusqu’aux commodités les plus privées, à des appareils électroniques. avec des risques lourds, quand ces appareils, leur logiciels, et l’économie de ce qu’ils véhiculent, sont sous monopole de quelques groupes dont l’art et la civilisation sont moins la préoccupation que la bourse et la domination” (8). 6 “nos nouveaux usages de lecture, les propres forms denses que ces usages sont susceptibles d’engendrer, et qui ne se révéleront à notre imaginaire qu’à mesure que nous les expérimenterons…” (15). 7 “l’oeurve principale de baudelaire n’a jamais été un livre”;“baudelaire n’a pas écrit les fleurs du mal” (70; 67). 8 “…une ensemble sans contours” (137). 9 “kafka est une masse sombre.”; “diffraction, nuage” (143). humanist studies & the digital age staiger 7.1 2022 6 and, bon avers, “and for the most acerbic things one had to express, which put a mirror to the political apparatus (dispositif) taken in all its concrete elements, one had to really send it through the mail” (159).10 bon concludes: but what a definitive example of literature without the book, of a summoning of a private form of writing to bring literature in political contact with the world, according to an efficacity – at the risk of ephemerality and oblivion – that the book would never be able to confer upon it! exactly what we are looking for in web writing. (160-1).11 for bon the promise of writing on the web lies in its immediate consequentiality, a direct intervention in the events of the world that he calls in the broad sense political, a promise so great that the ephemerality and oblivion that would seem to be the fate of most writing, on the web or in books, are ingeniously converted into the stakes of a daring existential bid for relevance. closely allied to the virtue of immediacy in bon’s view is that of brevity. it is simply a practical constraint that writing that is closely responsive to events–or at least to the moment of one’s own being, and that is going to have a direct effect on the social world,– is going to be relatively brief. while short forms may be written and disseminated in any medium, the digital environment particularly favors them. noting in the section, “towards a history of brevity” how the demands of the periodical press fostered the form of the short story and thus had a profound effect on the development of american literature, so that for authors such as faulkner and hemingway the short story became “the social site” while their novels were “…an almost personal exercise or reserved for the more limited public of patrons of book stores.”12 bon observes that, analogously, “the tools of the web, which limit the load of what they transmit (one hundred forty characters for twitter, four hundred fifty characters for facebook) have created an infinity of roundabout practices (usage détournés)” (132).13 from a theoretical standpoint, the crucial passage in the section, indeed in the whole book, is the following: with blog publication, in which the posts follow the rhythm of daily publication, and our own practices of daily consultation of aggregators, we read each web page as a complete story. nevertheless (and this trend is increasing), the majority of blogs propose a series, or constructed ensembles, and ask that these ensembles be retrospectively discovered in a continuous manner. from this point of view, that which one calls the “digital book” could not but be the retrospective construction of a fragmented writing – but this fragmentation during the time of writing was already that of literature in general (the constraint of one hundred twenty words a day that stevenson imposed on himself) and it is the slow time of material publication of the printed book that has rendered this process of recomposition invisible to us (131).14 10 “et que ce qu’on exprime de plus acide, qui met en miroir le dispositif politique pris par ce faisceau d’éleménts concrets, on a réellement à l’expédier par la poste” (159). 11 “mais quel exemple définitif de littérature sans livre, de convocation d’un usage privé de l’écrit pour que la littérature vienne au contact politique du monde, selon une effectivité – au risque de l’éphémère, de l’oubli – que le livre ne saurait lui conférer! exactement ce que nous cherchons dans l’ écriture web.” (160-1). 12 “le lieu social…”; “un exercice quasi personnel ou réservé au public plus restreint des libraries” (130). 13 “les outils de reseaux, qui limitent la charge… de ce qu’ils transportent (cent quarante caractères pour twitter, quatre cents cinquante caractères pour facebook), ont créé une infinite d’usages détournés).” (132). 14 “avec le publication sur blog, rythmée et indexée selon le jour de publication du billet, et nos propres usages de consultation quotidienne de nos agrégateurs, nous lisons chaque page web comme une histoire complete. pourtant (et ce mouvement tend à s’intensifier), la plupart des blogs proposent des séries, des ensembles construits, appellent à découvrir rétrospectivement ces ensembles de façon continue. de ce point de vue, ce qu’on nomme “livre humanist studies & the digital age staiger 7.1 2022 7 rather strikingly, bon elevates the fragment to the essential form of literature. as a matter of necessity, one does not write a book, one writes parcels that eventually add up to a book. now this point would reduce to the obvious – since we are creatures of time, our exertions are necessarily spread out in quanta of application – if it did not insinuate that writing has to be fresh in order to be urgent, or at the least that its urgency has a fairly short half-life. for the implication is that the printed book, to name the whole in question, has something artificial about it inasmuch as it submerges the expressive claims of the parts of which it is comprised. these claims are deemed to have a superior authenticity by virtue of their association with the heat of a present moment whose exigencies continue to inform them. the conceptual unity of the printed book, bon suggests, is compromised for being the result of a process whose individual stages it conceals. at the same time as bon seeks to expose the instability of the book, his thinking about the history of the book is informed by an evolutionary paradigm according to which later stages of development conserve the advances or conquests of previous stages, while transforming and adapting them. thus, for example, he worries how the thickness of the physical book, which orients the reader by providing a visual and tactile gauge of their progress through the text, can be preserved in the digital environment. the evolutionary model includes change within a reassuring framework of continuity; the new forms we may devise will extend developments in the history of the books rather than abandon them. bon believes that “there is nothing more highly technological than the modern printed book,”15 but also that we are in an epochal moment in which our daily intercourse with new communication technologies are bringing about sweeping changes in our relation to the word and the world, changes that will inevitably affect the book along with everything else and push that rich evolution still further (103). new forms of the book in the digital realm may be at variance with our common intuitions of what the book is, and yet in bon’s account those intuitions have solidified around a conceptual illusion of fixity that scants the multifarious range of actual specimens of books through history. the looseness and fragmentation that bon identifies in his historical examples of the book in order to destabilize its fixed concept are qualities that the digital medium especially encourages. après le livre itself exemplifies these qualities, as well as the initiative and resourcefulness bon urges upon its readers. originally born as blog posts, each of the individual mini essays that make up the book conserves its self-sufficient rhetorical thrust, creating a mosaic of differently-angled approaches to bon’s demonstration of the book’s dependence on “the material conditions of its enunciation.” the logic that organizes the whole could be said to be not strictly bibliographic but blogospheric, each piece being intimately bound up, at least in theory, with the occasion of its production as a piece of writing for the web. hence the title, which paradoxically announces the supersession of the thing it names, is justified by bon’s contention that digital technology has already thoroughly remade our writing and reading practices, and by extension our relation to the world, so that effectively, as he states in the last of the book’s mini-essays, “we are already after the book” (270).16 yet the assemblage of the individual pieces in book form confers a unity that is not only physical but also thematic, while not incidentally boosting their collective discoverability. numérique” pourrait n’être que cette construction retrospective d’une écriture fragmentée – mais cette fragmentation dans le temps d’écriture était déjà celle de la littérature en general (la contrainte des cint vingt mots quotidiens que s’imposait stevenson), et c’est le temps long de la publication matérielle du livre imprimé qui nous rendait invisible ce processus de recomposition.” (131). 15 “rien de plus hautement technologique que le livre imprimé moderne” (103). 16 “nous sommes déjà après le livre” (270). humanist studies & the digital age staiger 7.1 2022 8 the book repurposed the two experiments with digital books that bon conducted before the publication of après le livre both exploit the qualities of immediacy, brevity, and plasticity that, as we have seen, he identifies as the particular virtues of the new medium, though in different ways. in 2005-6 bon opened up his creative process with the sequential publication, in 227 daily installments on his website, of what would become the novel, tumulte, a book made entirely of “invented stories and memories mingled, those tilting moments in the experience of the day and cities, writing without premeditation and immediately available on the internet” (7).17 the resultant pastiche preserves the centrifugal thrust of the units of composition whose individual situational interest and validity, as we have seen him contend in après le livre, are veiled by the illusion of completeness that attends the book published so long after their advent. the title refers to the welter of daily experience the book records, but also to the dynamic medley of genres and media that in particular make up the web version of the work, which included photographs and other material since suppressed. in the preface to the printed work bon describes the whole as “a book… born… of these accumulated pathways, an unexpected clearing, submitted to the friction of the world and its days” and asks “is not all that also the novel?” (7).18 this tantalizing question has no sure answer. summoning the well-known extensibility of the term, one might say that it is interesting to think of it as a novel if the author calls it one. it is like a novel in the pride of place it gives to subjective experience; its mass of raw material is proto-novelistic, as if bon had succeeded in going beneath the novel form to dredge up the substratum of fantasy and perception and dailiness that authors draw upon to fashion a novel; it particularly resembles a modern novel in its turning itself inside-out to reflect on the process of its own genesis; and even in its bulk it is novel-like. yet this generic indeterminacy echoes a more fundamental indeterminacy deriving from the existence of two discrepant versions of the same work in different media. in her discussion of tumulte, the critic alice james underscores the almost uncanny ontological ambiguity resulting from tumulte’s double existence. while the website may be regarded as a supplement or epitext to the book, she notes, “the book’s constant reflection on its own mode of production makes it difficult to approach [the] print version as an independent object” (42). the web version contains images and references, including comments on other authors, that did not make it into the book. as bon revised the entries, the original drafts were erased, appropriately enough according to the logic of immediacy he wishes to espouse. even so, the printed version bears evidence of the earlier stages of its coming into being, preserving future-tense reflections on its eventual publication as a book and referring to its own passages as “these online texts.”19 citing these and other peculiarities of bon’s project, james comments that “the printed ‘novel’ thus points beyond itself to its origins and continuations in ‘virtual’ space, but also stands as a material monument that replaces the ephemeral online archive” (43). such uncertainty leads her ultimately to reflect, “where then is tumulte, what is its place? in some respects, it must be understood as a conceptual project, forever incomplete, always invoking the idea of a book that would be an ultimate revelation, but that lies forever beyond our grasp… the printed text becomes a point of entry into [a] hidden book, the original project, whose totality is accessible only to its author (46-7).” the limitless plasticity that is 17 “d’histoires inventées et de souvenirs mêlés, ces instants de bascule dans l’expérience du jour et des villes, écriture sans préméditation et immédiatement disponible sur internet” (7). 18 “naissait un livre fait de ces chemins accumulés, un défrichement imprévu, soumis a la friction du monde et des jours. est-ce que ce n’est pas aussi tout cela, le roman?” (7) 19 “ces textes en ligne.” humanist studies & the digital age staiger 7.1 2022 9 one of the distinguishing capacities of the digital book, its ready revisability, becomes in the case of tumulte the carefully crafted undecidability as to the relative priority of web and print versions. in 2010 bon retyped his second novel, limite (1985), word for word onto his website, made slight alterations along the way, added autobiographical commentary on the different sections of the novel, and renamed the resultant new work, “roman de limite” (novel of limit). later, he gathered the commentary into a continuous strand, made some changes to the layout of the novel’s sections, and made this further work available as an ebook with the title, the second book is always the most difficult to write: limit and the novel of limit.20 as a final step, he made the ebook purchasable as a print-on-demand physical book in 2016. together, these multiple versions of what is by and large the same text, each slightly reconfigured according to the capacities of the platform in which it is contained – website, ebook, physical book – constitute another experiment with the forms of the book in the digital medium that raises deep questions about the nature of the book. one suspects that retyping rather than scanning his novel onto his website was an important step for bon because it reactivated his relationship to the work he had written more than two and a half decades earlier, allowing him to make little changes and awakening the memories and associations that comprise the web version, which is thus akin to a director’s cut of the original novel. it made for the practice of a certain immediacy, even as he remediated a former work: adding fresh commentary to the text he was reviving lent it the effect of a direct action of the sort he extols in the case of madame de sévigné. as for his predilection for brevity, the sections of this commentary accompanying chunks of the original text, amount to about a dozen pages. it is thus in its plasticity, the third distinguishing attribute of writing in the digital environment championed by bon, that the chief interest of his project lies. the versions of limite bon put in play are only four: the original print novel, the web edition with commentary, the ebook version of web edition, and the print-on-demand version of that. yet in their differences they gesture towards the ideal of infinite textual mutability that has become practicable with the advent of the digital. limite presents the thoughts and perceptions of four loosely related working-class characters during one day of their lives: industrial designer, soccer player, guitarist in a rock band, and their unemployed friend. displaying the same penchant for experimentation that bon will display and advocate two and a half decades later in après le livre, it is executed in a style that might be called experimental realism; that is, unlike most cuttingedge fiction of the post 60s era, it does not impugn the existence of “the real,” but, eschewing the worn conventions of realism, it employs radical methods for attaining it. the novel is structured through brief “bursts of reality,” in the words of one critic, intense stream-of-consciousness vignettes that rely on compression, ellipsis, argot and other verbal means to create the effect of direct immersion in the worlds of its characters.21 erika fülöp, who has discussed bon’s remediation of the novel at length, observes that there is a continuity between his early concern with “the real” and the new order of direct contact with the reader made possible by the web. she also connects the roman de limite with the modernist tradition of works in which “the process is consubstantial with the product” (75). i would add more particularly that the memoir about one’s creative work is a subgenre that has recently been enjoying a vogue among french novelists, as for example in recent works about their works by novelists christine montalbetti, gerard gavarry, and, in the burlesque mode, eric chevillard.22 20 le deuxième livre est toujours le plus difficile a écrire: limite et le roman de limite. 21 “éclats de réalité” 10 and passim. 22 christine montalbetti: en ecrivant journee americaine; gerard gavarry: façon d'un roman, ou, comment d'après le livre de humanist studies & the digital age staiger 7.1 2022 10 but the big difference between the print and web versions of limite is that the latter is porous, its boundaries uncertain. in the digital environment the novel fitted with bon’s reminiscences is only the shortest of hops away from the other personal material on his site and to the rest of the effectively infinite plethora of the web. in fülöp’s formulation, “the text placed in the network loses the material unity of the physical book (71).” this is crucial: the situation of the text on the web puts the identity of book starkly in play, raising questions in which the theoretical and practical, the profound and the trivial, are difficult to distinguish. the book seemingly dissolves in the digital environment, opened up, as fülöp describes, to lines of interest that may develop far from the textual field that is bon’s novel, or his novel of his novel. but material unity, mostly taken for granted as a property of the book in the predigital era, is no mean thing to be blithely dismissed. it has always quietly served the crucial function of furnishing an analog for the conceptual unity the book confers on the textual elements it contains, such as the poems of baudelaire, the letters of madame de sévigné, or the mini-essays of bon that make up après le livre. bon’s experiment brings home the fundamental tension between our tendency to think in terms of discrete entities, of things, and our recognition of the ways in which such thinking can be inadequate. we can readily adjust to the idea that the web version of limite is a dual entity, but it is stretching the concept to think of it as a book. fülöp chooses the term “project” to differentiate the various phases of bon’s remediation of limite from the physical book, with all that designation implies of unity and closure; in contrast, “the digital allows the author to embrace the organic and continuous development of writing, in the life of which each publication, each update and new version is now admittedly just one stage rather than a conclusion” (83). bon himself invokes “the logic of the project” with respect to the ensemble of versions of limite; and effectively defines this as “an open work, meaning that it can be constantly remodelled” (quoted in fülöp, 83).23 throughout her discussion she is alive to the tension between the “the logic of the book” and “the logic of the project,” between closure and fixity and openness and mutability, detectible in the drift of bon’s own terminology. thus, while citing bon’s claim that the placement of limite on the web “amounts to an active contestation of the concept of the book as a closed object,” she adjoins that “by the same token, it affirms the unity of the author’s oeuvre as a whole in its digital existence, as a literary space shaped by him” (72). the conceptual integrity that is lost on the level of the book is recouped on the level of the oeuvre in the form of the website, which, however, contains the word for book, “livre,” in its very name, tierslivre. further on she finds it “remarkable that even in [his] description of the project, bon calls the result ‘a complete online electronic book’” (72). however liberating the logic of the project may seem to be, the logic of the book proves to be tenacious even in bon’s own characterizations. he describes the ebook version of limite as “a digital version, reread, revised & augmented with a feuilleton on the genesis of the novel on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of its publication” (quoted in fülöp, 77).24 fülöp comments: while [the web version] seemed to move away from the logic of the book and traditional publishing, this reframing with reference to an anniversary as a trigger draws on the editorial strategy of the conventional book market…. if we are not entirely returning to the fixity of the printed book published by a third-party publisher, there is nevertheless the return to the logic of the book… judith j'ai inventé une histoire de banlieue, et à l'aide du cocotier, du cargo, du centaure, écrit trois fois hop là (sic!); eric chevillard: l’auteur et moi. 23 “un’ oeuvre ouverte, ça veut dire qu’on peut la remodeler en permanence” (quoted in fülöp, 83). 24 “version numérique, relue, révisée & augmentée d’un feuilleton sur la genèse du roman pour le 30ème anniversaire de sa publication” humanist studies & the digital age staiger 7.1 2022 11 severed from the website even though sold through it, and readable independently from the network that gave rise to it (78). what the logic of the book entails is a certain boundedness, a coherence, that the several changes bon makes in the ebook edition of limite serve to reinforce. he supplies the name for each narrator at the beginning of each section, obviating the need for the reader to work out the identity of the narrator from the content of the narration. while this simplification is not strictly entailed by the logic of the book, since the more ambiguous presentation was a feature of the original print edition, it nevertheless suggests bon feels the need to provide to reference points to orient the reader in the virtual space of the ebook that the physical edition could dispense with. he removes all but one of the hyperlinks from the commentary, sealing the book off from the digital environment that dissolved its boundaries in the web version. he numbers the segments of the commentary, a move which, as fülöp notes, gives it more identity as a textual thread in its own right, while at the same time ensuring that it “is now more tightly intertwined with the novel’s passages as here they alternate throughout in a single document” (78, emphasis mine). even this last phrase attests to the force of the persistence of the logic of the book – for it is only on the ideal plane that this “single document” can be grasped as such. bon even goes so far as to reinforce the unity of ebook by giving one of the narrators his own initials, so that he becomes a character in his fiction as well as the author of the commentaries upon it. “if the unification of the text in a single file reinforces the symbiosis between the two threads visually and structurally,” fülöp comments, “this newly declared identity of the two voices unifies them semantically and ontologically…” (81). the logic of the book seems to entail the increased presence of the author. in the end, bon created a print-on-demand version of the whole project, with the title, the second novel is always more difficult to write and the subtitle, limite, and the novel of limite and then, on the title page, a second subtitle, limite, and feuilleton of the rewriting of limite, a superimposition that implies the ontological undecidability of the project and gives equal weight to each of what we might think of its versions: novel, commented novel, ebook. bon asks, “why print on demand?” and answers “1) because it exists, 2, because it is going to become in the coming months an essential cog in the distribution of the book” (quoted in fülöp).25 this would seem to concede that, despite all the play with the expressive possibilities of the different digital versions and the putative advantages of the digital as a means for immediate publication, the print book is still necessary for the project to reach an audience. in sympathy with bon’s venture, fülöp herself attempts to ward off any irony one might find in the choice to cap the project with the good old print book encompassing the whole, characterizing it as a further exploration of medium-specific possibilities offered by the print-on-demand mode: “the printed book returns, not as a recognition of the failure of the digital adventure or the persisting superiority of the paper book, but as an affirmation of the technological advances that enable it.” but she allows that “it also illustrates the persistence of the financial indispensability of the printed book” (84). more than just financial, however, one might think the indispensability is also epistemological, in that bon’s experiment stands a better chance of being discovered and recognized if it exists as discrete thing. in her summary, fülöp characterizes limite as a “truly transmedial… project… in that each version brings something new… and it is not one but three and four: limite, the 1985 novel, limite et roman de limite, the 2010 online autoblography; limite et feuilleton de l’invention de limite, the 2014 e-book, and limite, the sum of all of these” (82). yet, as we have also seen in the stubborn reassertion of the logic of the book even in midst of 25 “1) parce qu’elle existe, 2, parce qu’elle va devenir dans les prochains mois un rouage essentiel de la diffusion du livre.” humanist studies & the digital age staiger 7.1 2022 12 bon’s endeavor to pursue the logic of the project, closure is not easily banished. even as one postpones completion of the project as a whole, closure reestablishes itself on the level of the unit represented by the various stages bon has brought forth. and while bon may have blurred the identity of the novel limite in an array of configurations, limite the project has been closed for many years. the book after all? bon’s experiments demonstrate some ways in which writing can exploit the specific powers of the digital medium to create new forms. yet whether they reveal likely paths the book may take in the future is not certain. is bon arguing that in the future all writing, even ambitious literary writing, will be done on the web and will be molded by that medium’s affordances to take advantage of the qualities of immediacy, brevity, and plasticity he champions? a late, uncharacteristically sarcastic, entry in après le livre on “imperturbable writers” certainly makes it seem that way. in bon’s account, the sin of the imperturbable writers is that they are incurious about the new technology. carrying on with their writing and publishing as they have been doing all along, they don’t have author sites, they haven’t explored the new possibilities opened up by the web, and, although they allow that the internet is fine for scientists, sociologists, and sellers of books and other merchandise, they act as if it wasn’t there and had no importance for what they are doing. the segment makes clear that for bon the relationship between the old technology of the book and the new technology of the web is not one of coexistence, but rather of supersession after all: those who go on producing novels according to the old patterns are ridiculously and even contemptibly out of date. yet this seems quite unfair: has the rise of digital technology and the possibilities of instant publication through the web rendered the novel, product of a supposedly suddenly antiquated dispensation, obsolete? or is it that the imperturbability of these writers is based on their belief that the content of what they have to say is paramount and counts for a great deal more than the containers in which it is conveyed? that it is by means of the minute negotiations of words, intimately allied to motions of mind, that the canny writer communicates new ideas in accordance with new conditions of experience, rather than by new means of delivery? the appeal of bon’s projects seems to me chiefly theoretical and academic. while it is not within the scope of either james’s or fülöp’s essays to treat the semantic realm of the respective texts with which bon experiments, but only their general implications as projects in the digital medium, an exclusive focus on the medium can easily lead us to forget that first and foremost they are texts, that is, an amount of words arranged to refer to states and events in an empirical or imagined world. in deference to the principle that every change in the vehicle makes a difference in the content that is conveyed, a principle that currently has the vast sanction of the materialist disposition in humanistic thinking behind it, we want to believe that our reception of the sumptuous texts of limite and tumulte is colored by the medium in which we encounter them. yet there remains the question of how much and in what way the different experience of a particular text in different media bears on our understanding of its semantic substance. perhaps the meaning of the medium and the meaning of the message are not as interdependent as we schematically like to think. when i am engaged with one of the 237 sections that make up the print edition of tumulte, some of them stripped-down fictive scenarios, some metacommentary, many autobiographical, my awareness that what i am reading was first written directly online without drafts recedes into the background as a point of circumstantial interest that has little to do with the main thing: the reckoning with the thrust of the individual pieces. the qualities that are particularly favored by writing on the web amount, in bon’s exposition, to a general elevation of process over product. the digital medium encourages, to a degree previously unthinkable, the humanist studies & the digital age staiger 7.1 2022 13 baring of the creative process that was already a pronounced tendency in his pre-web writings. the web effectively collapses the distance between writing and publishing: writers can post their efforts on the web, receive criticism, reformulate, and repost. multiple versions can easily be displayed side by side, and, as in the case of tumulte, the variability of digital publishing allows for the purging of elements from the print version that appeared in the web posts, blurring the question of priority between the two texts. all of these effects that take advantage of the possibilities of changeability and instantaneity afforded by the digital medium to highlight process have, as i have suggested, the cachet of authenticity behind them. in their exposure of the written text as a sequence of approaches to the formulation of meaning that is empirical and constructed and not ideal and final, they are in accord with the general tendency towards self-reflexivity and the foregrounding of technique that has prevailed in our culture for decades. more particularly, the assumption of progress that accompanies this tendency entails a characterization of the traditional book as limited and, in regions of academic discourse where the influence of post-structuralism continues to exert a distinct if general influence, even oppressive. already at the beginning of the digital revolution paul duguid found it noteworthy that “a fair amount of poststructuralist theory is being ingested to provide support for what is, in fact, the demonization of the book” (75). in the early days, digital technology was going to free textuality from the stodgy confines of the book, which with its closure and fixity could suddenly be deemed an obstacle to the free dissemination of a generalized écriture that seems to be bon’s implicit ideal. yet one might think such a demonization of the book is a rather sloppy confusion of discursive orders; the book is closed only in the mundane sense that it is a discrete thing, but within that closure its semantic and conceptual reach can be all but infinite. one could even go so far as to say that its boundedness is what makes possible its boundlessness. even in fülöp’s careful exposition, these shades of what duguid calls “liberation technology” are detectible. about so fraught an issue it may not be possible to remain impartial, but in comparing the different qualities of the book version of limite and its digital revampment, fülöp’s language subtly departs from strict neutrality, tilting towards the rhetoric of readerly empowerment that has all but obligatorily accompanied discussions of digital technology from the time of its advent. the web version of limite becomes “part of a reader’s journey which weaves a mental text following the logic of their points of interest and the links offered across the web, rather than a logic proposed by any single author or work” (71). this may sound liberating, but is also a rather idealized depiction of what could also be described as distraction, dispersal, dissolution. conversely, while the phrase “following… a logic proposed by any single author or work,” is meant to stigmatize traditional engagement with literary art as now limiting and retrograde, the same activity could easily be phrased in affirmative rather than pejorative terms, such as “participating in the author’s revelatory negotiations of sense.” further on, fülöp’s bias becomes still more conspicuous when she asserts, “renouncing the sacred status of the work’s structure as a self-sufficient entity with a core is the price to pay for opening up to the web and entering the flux…” (72). this is delicately couched. she does not directly state whether the price is worth it, but, again, the language insinuates that it is, since for the skeptical academics like ourselves who comprise her readership the label “sacred” is bait for antagonism. yet the price seems to be very steep. what does “opening up to the web and entering the flux” actually mean? and why is it automatically assumed to be a good? the language in this sentence verges on the religious: “entering the flux” may be fine as a prescription for one’s spiritual expansion, but in practical terms it doesn’t furnish an explanation of its supposed benefits beyond the implication that following whatever paths one is inclined to follow is better than following the paths set down by the author, which seems to me to miss the whole point of reading. the hollowness of what fülöp proposes as the benefit of placing limite on the web and dissolving its boundaries, at the point humanist studies & the digital age staiger 7.1 2022 14 when the exposition would seem to demand that this advantage be spelled out concretely, is particularly telling. every reader will have experienced the benefits of concentrated attention to a written work – but what is to be gained from placing that same work on the web – the ability to leave it in favor of other things that beckon to one’s attention, in the name of a putative immersion in a textuality whose rewards are far from apparent? against the easy celebration of the supposed emancipatory effects of writing published on the web, it might be in order in the remainder of this essay to draw on the insights of the discipline of book history to make a preliminary pass at a sketch of the virtues of textual fixity and stability that are routinely disparaged in accounts of the digital. if one of the lessons of which book historians like to remind us is that the book has always been changing, another is that the fixity of the printed page was an achievement that had decisive effects on the propagation of knowledge. this claim was first advanced by historian elizabeth eisenstein in her influential study, the printing press as an agent of change in early modern europe. the power of eisenstein’s account consists in the wide-ranging ways she evokes the concrete effects of what is at bottom the mental phenomenon of the experience of a stabilized record of knowledge based on the printed page, implicitly asking the reader to comparatively imagine what the world of letters and the life of the mind was like before and after such a record was available. in short, the fixity of the printed page made it possible on a scale never before experienced to secure gains in thought and knowledge, which then could become the object of scrutiny and comparison, by many minds working on the same, standardized versions. as she puts it, in a formulation that applies equally to humanistic studies and the rising sciences, “once a finding could be permanently secured by being registered in print, the way was paved for an unending series of discoveries and for the systematic development of investigatory techniques” (124). thus, “permanence introduced a new form of progressive change. the preservation of the old… was a prerequisite for a tradition of the new” (86). eisenstein argues that print was in effect the engine of the spread of knowledge that underlay the renaissance, the reformation, and the scientific revolution, and thus was decisive in the rise of modernity.26 and these are just the social effects; in his famous study, orality and literacy, walter ong enumerates an ample array of psychological effects of print, including the fostering of introspection, interiority, and individuation that depend on having a fixed noetic world established by print books. the importance of the fixity of the printed text is so basic it is easily overlooked. it is the prerequisite for intellectual exchange – even arguments for the ultimate indeterminacy of meaning come to us in the fixed forms of books the meaning of whose passages can be cited, analyzed, and argued about in their turn because they are physically identical for every reader. moreover, the printed page is not simply the arbitrary capture of the latest stage of an ongoing writing process that has no greater claim to our interest than any of the previous stages or possible later ones. fixity implies finality.27 yes, thought has no ultimate resting place, in principle there is always more to say, further perspectives and contexts that can be brought to bear on a subject. but there is an operative finality we aim for in written communication. on one level, writing, necessarily comes out of us sequentially, so that it can be casually imagined to transcribe an unfolding process of thinking. yet though 26 i am aware that eisenstein’s argument has been challenged, most notably by adrian johns in the nature of the book. johns argues that print, because it made forgery and piracy possible, actually destabilized the record of knowledge, thus necessitating the development of social norms to regulate and guarantee the authenticity of texts. however, for the purposes of my argument the key point is that johns does not contest the importance of fixity, but only the nature of the historical circumstances that led to it. 27 cf ong: “print encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text has been finalized, has reached a state of completion” (132). humanist studies & the digital age staiger 7.1 2022 15 we read what is written in one direction, writing is not a one-way street, but an iterative labor in which thoughts build on one another, ideas are selected and rejected, formulations are set down only to be reworked. along the way drafts serve as provisional objectifications of one’s thoughts, which allow one to identify gaps and contradictions, and address them, and understand better what to emphasize and what to downplay. in such a manner the writer gradually draws nearer and nearer to a suitable arrangement of words for the intuition or intuitions they want to convey. even more complexly, the initial intuition may be fugitive or confused, so that one gets a grip on it only in the repeated attempts to word it, which externalizes it so that it can be held up for evaluation and further development. eventually some degree of satisfaction with one’s composition together with some accommodation to the need to have something to show the world leads one to commit to a final state of the words on the page in the fixed form of printed book or article. thus reified, the airy swirl of one’s hunches and preconceptions and stances and arguments are then available in an organized form to others for stimulus, inspection, critique, etc., as they come to terms with their own ideas about the issues in question (to confine the discussion to expository writing) perhaps with a view to elaborating their own positions in response. writing is an orchestration of words, a crystallization of mind. this is not to imply that it is a rigid block of semantic algebra. good writing may be leagues away from raw process, but it generally includes the imitation of process, which is to say that one can carefully manage one’s words in order to create the effect of a consecutive process of thinking, of logical progression, of the drama, even, of reasoning. we want writing to flow, that is, we want it to simulate the fluidity of a thought process even within the fixed architecture of the completed product, but compared to the actual messy to-do by which that sensation of movement is achieved the effect of process is highly refined and idealized. would you like to see the several drafts of this essay, the many attempts at adequate expression behind just this present paragraph? this arrangement of words will suffice, i imagine, for your purpose of understanding my positions and judging my arguments. i have no wish to see the drafts of fülöp’s study of bon’s limite project; the published version cogently lays out her interpretation of the significance of the aspects of bon’s project that pertain to possible forms the book may take in the digital era. in the realm of imaginative literature, which trades much more heavily in aesthetic qualities, the demand for lifelike flow is even more pronounced. so, the inclusion of something like pure process may indeed be a desideratum, even if, as long as print was the only medium for its conveyance, the display of true process functioned like an unattainable asymptote, as in beckett’s the unnameable. throughout the 20th-century literary writers have employed stream-of-consciousness, metafiction, casual narrative style, and other techniques to open up their texts to unkempt process, but what they are in effect doing is fruitfully playing upon the tension between spontaneity and artifice. that is, as long as the fixity of the work is an inescapable given, one can include within it as many notes of process as one wants and thereby achieve an agreeable dishevelment and dissonance. but with the advent of the web the case is now different. one can, as bon has done, send brief pieces out into the electronic yonder daily, radically shortening the interval between message and reception and, inasmuch as the pieces are understood to be parts of an eventual whole, allow the recipients to follow the process of a work’s coming into being with unprecedented closeness. as already noted bon sees in this immediacy of contact a superior social agency for writing, and although one might suspect that this agency is more ideal than real, such an objection is not wholly valid because in fairness it must be said it is debatable whether any account of the efficacy of literature, including the cultural historical ones currently in vogue, are free of a generous admixture of idealism. but what is offered as process has an extremely short floruit indeed before it hardens into product. as james observes, “tumulte conveys the poignant sense of a lost immediacy, humanist studies & the digital age staiger 7.1 2022 16 aligning the act of writing with the fragility of the present moment that disappears even as it appears” (43). what’s left is the book, tumulte, which has the unselfconscious frankness of a journal or sketchbook, but lacks the internal coherence that comes from more considered writing. without the foil of fixity, fluidity comes across as mere lack of development. while bon’s writing is itself meticulous and eloquent, nowhere in après le livre does one find this sense of writing as (relatively) perfected communication, the crystallization of a labor of thought, i have tried to sketch as an alternative to the picture of writing as a good in itself that informs his theory. to have acknowledged this deliberative dimension of the writerly endeavor would be to call into question the extent that our writing is shaped, or channeled, or colored – it is the precise nature of the causality that is in question – by material processes. bon finesses the question of determinism nicely, as i have noted, by suggesting a kind of reciprocal interaction of the writing process and our tools. yet for all that he leaves the nature of the relationship between them vague. the effect of our tools on our writing or forms of writing does not seem to appear so strong when one considers writing from an interior standpoint. how deep does the influence of our tools go? if tools affect how we write, do they also affect how we think? or perhaps the connection between writing and “the material conditions of its enunciations and its reproducibility,” to recall bon’s formulation cited above, has been overemphasized? perhaps our tools are what we always thought them to be -at least before the style of thinking became fashionable that purports to show the dependence of what has been deemed central on what has usually been dismissed as marginal -instruments, means, but unimportant to the undertaking of writing itself? so ingrained is the materialist disposition of contemporary academic thought that the proposal that maybe the marginal is marginal after all may seem preposterous. yet, does it make a difference to the thought i am conveying in this sentence that it was scrawled on recycled college-ruled paper in a handy 8 ¼ by 6 ⅞ inch notebook with a cheap pen, corrected in the same manner, and then improved while being typed on a laptop keyboard? or is the thought rather generated inwardly, responsive to the demands of my argument as i feel them emerging and subsequently tidied up in accordance with internalized criteria of effective communication? it may be true as bon claims that our thoroughgoing reliance on digital technology is remaking our orientation to the world, but are the effects of that reorientation to be located at the point of contact with our tools or in more intimate regions of our understanding of ourselves and our possibilities? in any case, one could only regard “les écrivains imperturbables” – for all his unnamed writers are understood to be novelists – as culpably out of style if one has lost faith in the novel itself as a major form of the book, and that, in turn, is all but tantamount to losing faith in texts themselves. i think this belief in the obsolescence of a dominant form to which he was formerly dedicated, having written some twenty novels himself, lends pathos to his decision to repurpose limite. out-of-print, deaccessioned (my copy is a former library book from a remainder house in france), forgotten, even by its author, who also even renounced the genre of which it is an exemplar because of its insufficient reality, limite was a good candidate for revival because it was in effect dead and buried. this very alienation from his own creative effort of some three decades earlier allowed for the pleasant surprises of the recollection he engaged in while retyping the textual mass on his website. one could see in this revival an allegory for the career of print texts in the digital age: outmoded, neglected, inert, but then given new life on the web when they are reframed, retouched, relaunched. in this allegory, limite stands for both an old novel bon happened to write, and any old novel, and indeed print literature itself, its title nicely serving to signify not just the limit of representation, of the extreme verbal means employed to simulate the immersion in the lived consciousness of possible others, but the end point of the relevance of a worn-out genre and medium overtaken by new urgencies allied with new communications humanist studies & the digital age staiger 7.1 2022 17 technologies. the allegory might even be thought to gain further pertinence from the circumstance that the reborn versions of limite conserve the book published in 1985, while building on it and adapting it to a new medial environment in accordance with the evolutionary paradigm that informs bon’s thinking about cultural history. so, the earlier phase of print literature, the stratum of the book, would live on in the digital ever-after of the world wide web. except that the allegory could be construed in a less sanguine way, in which the afterlife offered by the web is little more than a lasting berth in an astronomically populated necropolis. for if the text bon so carefully crafted two and a half decades earlier is no longer vital enough to command attention in itself – and how many novels live on in the cultural imagination a couple of decades after their first appearance? – then it is doubtful that electronic repackaging is going to raise its profile with posterity and imbue it with immortality. whether it achieves that will have to depend on its own intrinsic power. works cited bon, françois. après le livre. paris: seuil, 2011. print. ---. limite. paris: editions de minuit, 1985. print. ---. limite, version numerique: https://www.tierslivre.net/spip/spip.php?rubrique60 ---. bon, françois. tumulte. paris: fayard, 2006. print. borsuk, amaranth. the book. cambridge, massachusetts; london, england: mit, 2018. print. mit press essential knowledge ser. print. darnton, robert. the case for books: past, present, and future. new york, ny: public affairs, 2009. print. duguid, paul. “material matters: the past and futurology of the book.” the future of the book. geoffrey nunberg, editor, university of california press, 1996, pp. 63-101. print. eisenstein, elizabeth l. divine art, infernal machine: the reception of printing in the west from first impressions to the sense of an ending. oxford: university of pennsylvania press, 2011. print. ---. the printing revolution in early modern europe. cambridge university press, 1983. print. fülöp, erika. “limite unbound: françois bon’s digitalized fiction and the reinvention of the book.” the journal of romance studies, vol. 16, no. 1, 2016, pp. 62–90. ebscohost, doi:10.3828/jrs.2016.160105. print. gavarry, gérard. façon d'un roman, ou, comment d'après le livre de judith j'ai inventé une histoire de banlieue, et à l'aide du cocotier, du cargo, du centaure, écrit trois fois hop là. p.o.l., 2003. print. hamilton, john t. “pagina abscondita: reading in the book’s wake.” kiene brillenburg wurth, et al. book presence in a digital age. new york: bloomsbury academic, 2018. print. hesse, carla. “books in time.” the future of the book. geoffrey nunberg, editor, university of california press, 1996, pp. 21-23. print. james, alison siân. “beyond the book: françois bon and the digital transition.” substance: a review of theory and literary criticism, vol. 40, no. 2 [125], 2011, pp. 37–51. ebscohost, searchebscohostcom.libproxy.uoregon.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&an=2011297186&login.asp&sit e=ehost-live. johns, adrian. the nature of the book: print and knowledge in the making. chicago, il: u of chicago, 1998. print. https://www.tierslivre.net/spip/spip.php?rubrique60(in humanist studies & the digital age staiger 7.1 2022 18 montalbetti, christine. en écrivant journée américaine: texte et photographies. paris: biro, 2009. print. nunberg, geoffrey. the future of the book. university of california press, 1996. print. ong, walter j. orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word. london; new york: methuen, 1982. print. piper, andrew. book was there: reading in electronic times. chicago; london: u of chicago, 2012. print. schnapp, jeffrey t., and battles, matthew. the library beyond the book. harvard university press, 2014. print. viart, dominique. françois bon: étude de l’oeuvre. paris: editions bordas, 2008. print. after the book, the book? the digital writing experiments of françois bon jeff staiger the future of the book after the book the book repurposed the book after all? works cited humanist studies & the digital age, 4.1 (2015) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.4.1.3381 from quill to mouse: digitizing the ‘woman of letters’ 1861-1922 ombretta frau and cristina gragnani abstract: this article describes a project in italian digital women’s studies, in-visiblewomen.org, which is currently being developed in collaboration with our two universities, and consists of an interpretive, thematic website on the material culture of italian female intellectuals between 1861 and 1922. we envision in-visiblewomen.org as a tool that facilitates the investigation of women’s agency in promoting social change and the interconnections between women writers’ material culture, their private space, their access to the public sphere and the impact of the new media revolution on women’s social status. unlike the majority of existing digital projects on women writers, ours is not only a digitized text-bank or a mere collection of bio-bibliographical data. rather, it will be a multilayered, interpretive platform stemming from the expert contribution of scholars in the field. our time boundaries comprise the period between italian unification (1861) and the beginning of the fascist era (1922). compared to other historical periods (the renaissance and the fascist and post-fascist decades, for example), this highly transformative era for women’s cultural production and consumption has inexplicably generated less scholarly attention. using a commissioned oil painting representing a late nineteenth century woman writer’s virtual study as interface, this project will be the first of its kind in the field of italian women studies. each object in this ideal study (pen, ink bottle, letters, magazines etc.) will be clickable and will lead to an encyclopedia-type entry. through the painting, users will be able to access two searchable databases organized hierarchically and interconnected through tagging: a themes database, and an authors database. history of the project as italian women’s studies scholars committed to collaboration and exchange of ideas, and concerned with finding ways in which our (and other scholars’) research can have an impact beyond the academic community, we have often remarked how books, articles, and public presentations are not enough to accomplish this task. digital tools have already done a lot to bring scholarly conversations about women out of the narrow boundaries of traditional methods of dissemination. the modern language association, among others, has been promoting scholarly collaboration in the humanities through the ever-growing mla commons. inspired by this endeavor, and by a range of existing websites about british and american women writers, http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ humanist studies & the digital age frau & gragnani 4.1 (2015) 99 we realized that our research on turn-of-the-twentieth century italian women could very well lend itself to an original digital interpretive database. our specific field of expertise – the works of little-known italian female intellectuals active in post-unification italy – is under-studied. these works are confined to (often) hard to reach libraries and small archives. we realize that this is one of the reasons why many scholars of italian women studies ignored this portion of italian literary production. our project will bring this hidden world out of the margins and will be a repository of knowledge for everyone interested in the history of women’s access to the public sphere (in italy as well as transnationally) in the period under consideration. this is how we started thinking about an interpretive website that could address some of the above-mentioned problems and thus decided to create a collaborative, expandable network: in-visiblewomen.org. description of the project in-visiblewomen.org consists of an interpretive, thematic website on the material culture of italian female intellectuals in late nineteenth and early twentieth century. our goal is to investigate women’s agency in promoting social change and the interconnections between women writers’ material culture, their private space, their access to the public sphere, and the impact of the new media revolution on women’s social status. far from being ‘just’ an archive, the website will function as both a database and an interpretive tool. unlike the majority of existing digital projects on women writers, ours will not be a digitized text-bank or a mere collection of bio-bibliographical data. rather, it is going to be a multilayered, interpretive platform with the expert contribution of scholars in the field. moreover, we envision the website becoming a useful teaching tool that will foster mentored undergraduate research and the development of courses on women’s studies and the material culture of italian female intellectuals, which can interact with the website data, increase it, and further develop it. at this initial stage, our time boundaries comprise the period between italian unification (1861) and the beginning of the fascist era (1922).1 these two milestones encompass a time of important social change for italian women when their increased visibility in literary circles, thanks to the development of the printing press (with magazines, periodicals, and even publishers supportive of female intellectuals), which favored their entrance in mainstream culture. additionally, new laws on education,2 and more relaxed social customs allowed for new roles for women in the public sphere. novelists and poets, but also sociologists, historians, art historians, journalists and activists had, for the first time, a visible place on the national cultural stage. later, world war i contributed to women’s emancipation and cemented their new role in society. 1 we are hoping to be able to expand our time boundaries at a later stage. for the time being, we are concentrating on our specific area of expertise. 2 on matters of women’s education in italy, see simonetta soldani’s evergreen l’educazione delle donne. this book includes, among others, chapters by carmela covato and annarita buttafuoco. more recent publications include joyce goodman’s girls’ secondary education in the western world: from the 18th to the 20th century. humanist studies & the digital age frau & gragnani 4.1 (2015) 100 needless to say, mussolini’s rise to power was followed by a number of setbacks for ordinary women. and yet some female intellectuals managed to navigate the complex fascist system and build a lasting career (for instance, anna franchi, paola masino, sibilla aleramo, benedetta cappa). in the past thirty years, the two fascist decades generated a substantial body of research in the field of italian women and gender studies both in italy and in the english and french speaking world. curiously, the previous sixty years have received significantly less scholarly attention. our research and our digital humanities project aim to fill this gap. ever since virginia woolf’s a room of one’s own appeared in 1929, scholars have addressed women’s domesticity and private space, producing a steady flow of studies on this topic. this was mostly in french and anglo-american scholarship, with illuminating and fruitful results. decades later, michel foucault’s reflections on space and its relationship with power sparked a significant interest in spatial analysis,3 although not necessarily with reference to women’s private space. italian studies are still lagging behind: few critical readings exist, mostly in sociology, anthropology, architecture, or foucauldian philosophy. the rare investigations of private literary space in italy are often dedicated to non-italian authors (among them, the brönte sisters and jane austen).4 when it comes to women’s personal space, exceptions include daniela gagliani and mariuccia salvati’s donne e spazio nel processo di modernizzazione and gisella bassanini’s work.5 but there is still too little written on women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and their space in italy, brief asides like martha king’s book on grazia deledda notwithstanding. we hope that in-visiblewomen.org can become the missing piece of a transnational critical jigsaw puzzle that does not yet fully include italy. in-visiblewomen.org’s design will shape its content to ensure a strong interpretive component. the website is going to be structured into three main sections: 1. a virtual study, a visual tool that provides access to the material culture of writing for a nineteenth century italian female intellectual; 2. a searchable author database; 3. a searchable theme database. 3 in january 2012, a new italian journal, «materiali foucaultiani», devoted its first issue to this topic (http://www.materialifoucaultiani.org). 4 we are referring to, among others, velia iannella’s gli spazi oscuri della metropoli. un viaggio misterioso nell’immaginario di oscar wilde; marcel proust. proust e lo spazio; fiorentini and ceserani’s raccontare e descrivere: lo spazio nel romanzo dell’ottocento; amalfitano and innocenti’s scene, itinerari, dimore. lo spazio nella narrativa del ‘700 and ginevra bompiani’s lo spazio narrante: jane austen, emily brönte, sylvia plath. 5 see bassanini’s tracce silenziose dell’abitare. la donna e la casa. humanist studies & the digital age frau & gragnani 4.1 (2015) 101 1. the virtual study. using the detailed image of a virtual home office as interface, we intend to bring the hidden reality of nineteenth century women’s writing to visibility. we commissioned art historian john varriano6 to produce an oil painting. this painting (see picture) reproduces an ideal late nineteenth century italian study. the goal of this feature is twofold: on the one hand, it disseminates factual and interpretive knowledge about material aspects of women’s writing; on the other, it functions as a visual pedagogical tool, which gradually and inductively introduces students and scholars to the multi-layered intellectual world of a late nineteenth century woman of letters. each object will be clickable and serve as a means of access into historical and artifactual knowledge. for instance, clicking on the ink bottle on the desk will lead to an encyclopedia-type entry on ink varieties, popular colors, and their meaning, history of ink production, and links to specialized websites. it will also provide scholarly information on types of ink preferred by the authors we examine: jolanda, for example, favored violet ink, and so do her intellectual female characters. hence, every time she develops a character with this feature, we know that she is projecting herself into her literary creation. we see the writer’s room as a locus of intimacy, but also, and foremost, as the place from which communication with the external world irradiates through reading and writing. in other words, this space is the fulcrum of a large network of interactions that involves women as well as men. transcending gender boundaries, it reveals aspects of the intellectual panorama of the time that would otherwise be impossible to capture. although private, objects in this virtual room constitute the passe-partout that opened the door to women’s participation in the public sphere.7 they are the precursors to today’s digital tools, from email to social networks. 6 emeritus professor of art history, mount holyoke college. 7 the bibliography on private and public sphere is extensive. some relevant studies for the period under consideration include gagliani and salvati’s la sfera pubblica femminile: percorsi di storia delle donne in età contemporanea; joan b. landes’ feminism, the private and the public and jean b. elshtain’s public man, private woman: women in social and political thought. humanist studies & the digital age frau & gragnani 4.1 (2015) 102 many women writers were confined in provincial settings, and yet – or maybe because of this – they understood (much more than it is commonly assumed) the importance of connecting with the external world, of debate, of communication. they were looking for access, for a place in mainstream culture. as marginalized subjects, today they would have been major consumers of social networks (facebook, twitter, e-books, e-journals, blogs) and mobile devices. during their lifetime, they were aided by the extraordinary proliferation of newspapers and magazines brought forward by the technological advancement of the printed media. these new technologies, paired with an efficient postal service, helped women to manage to open a breach in a world that was until then closed to them. it is through the ownership of the tools of the trade that these women became writers. we carefully selected the objects included in this virtual office. more than just objects, they are meant to be clusters of meaning that embody these writers’ persona. here follows a list:  furniture in the room: a desk with a chair; a bookshelf; a locked bookshelf; a small table; a chaise longue; a sewing basket; a window; a door.  objects: ink well; pen; paper knife; a magnifying glass; calling cards; hourglass; magazines; a notebook; writing paper; flowers; a teacup; a globe.  on the walls: a map of italy; a portrait of sappho; lamps. for instance, clicking on the stack of magazines will open a new window onto the world of (women’s) periodicals. a female intellectual of the time would have read the most prominent literary magazines (il marzocco, nuova antologia, natura ed arte) together with magazines for women (la donna, regina, margherita, cordelia, la rivista per le signorine). she would have been both a reader and a contributor with articles, rubrics, short stories, poetry. last but not least, she would have been active in these magazines’ ‘letters to the editor’, a section that often turned into a venue for debate, challenges, and fiery exchanges that look forward to today’s 140character tweets. clicking on the locked bookshelf will open a page with information on ‘forbidden’ books, such as gabriele d’annunzio’s works, french novels, and other books deemed not suitable for women. one cannot address fin de siècle women writers without addressing the controversial issue of identity construction. it was through careful self-representation in their own writings that women controlled part of this process. hence, our inclusion of an object belonging to an intellectual woman’s domestic sphere (the sewing basket) in our virtual study. the basket has a double function: first of all, it is a reminder of a woman’s ‘other’, less transgressive life, her daily reality as a daughter/wife/sister/mother. at the same time, it is also a gateway into the problematic dualism of domestic vs. public life, private vs. public sphere. sewing, knitting, crochet, embroidery are frequent topics of women’s writing. clicking on the sewing basket will open a window to a page with quotes from fictional and non-fictional works, in which our authors discuss the merits of domestic life. this section will include, to quote a few examples, emma boghen conigliani’s profiles of women intellectuals in la donna nella vita e nell’opera di giacomo leopardi (women in giacomo leopardi’s life and works, 1898) and sfinge’s 1912 elogio dell’ago e della pentola (in praise of needles and cooking pots). humanist studies & the digital age frau & gragnani 4.1 (2015) 103 2. the searchable author database. on the wall is a portrait of greek poet sappho by j. f. cazenave. we chose this particular portrait since cazenave was a 19th-century printmaker whose works would have been available and affordable at the time. clicking on sappho’s portrait, users will encounter a list of featured authors. while it may be surprising to some to find a portrait of a greek writer in an italian website, it should be stressed that, by the nineteenth century, sappho had become an icon of liberated women writing. sappho’s portrait will serve as an entry to a section of the website where authors can be fully explored. our initial list of women writers comprises the following authors: mara antelling (anna piccoli menegazzi, 1854-1904), ida baccini (1850-1911), emma boghen conigliani (1868?-1956?), willy dias (fortuna morpurgo, 1872-1856), anna franchi (1867-1954), evelyn franceschi marini (1864?-1920), elda gianelli (1856-1921), jolanda (maria majocchi plattis, 1864-1916), cesarina lupati (1877-1957), mantea (gina sobrero, 1863-1912), neera (anna radius zuccari, 1846-1918), guido da san giuliano (bianca belinzaghi, 1861-1943), sfinge (eugenia codronchi argeli, 1865-1934), flavia steno (amelia osta cottini, 1877-1946), anna vertua gentile (1850-1926), annie vivanti (1866-1942). we chose these authors because they are under-represented and (with few exceptions) almost unknown in the universe of italian women’s writing, unlike sibilla aleramo, matilde serao, grazia deledda, marchesa colombi, whose works and profiles can be easily traced online and in libraries and archives. in spite of their being ignored for almost a century, we believe that our authors’ intellectual profile is highly representative of the female cultural panorama of the period under consideration in more than one field: sociology, books of conduct, journalism, literary criticism, children’s literature, science, religious studies and, of course, fiction and poetry. we also believe that these writers prepared the ground for future women writers. although forgotten, their influence on future women writers cannot be underestimated. however, we must stress, once again, that ours is not simply a rescue operation. our goal is not just to save the above-mentioned names from oblivion. we want to bring the work of these women to the surface because it is impossible to fully understand women’s contribution to the national intellectual debate if we concentrate on those few names that are included in anthologies and literary histories, whose works have been re-published (sibilla aleramo, again, is a typical example). 3. the searchable themes database. clicking on the large bookshelf, users will be able to access the theme database. through an original thematic approach, in-visiblewomen.org allows for effective interdisciplinary and intertextual mapping. as jacqueline wernimont and julia flanders point out, making invisible women writers visible by grouping their biographies and works in a website is not enough to make women’s writing matter (“feminism in the age of digital archives: the women writers project”, 426). we believe that digital tools paired with effective methodology can significantly help resolve this issue: a reader (or a scholar) unaware of the existence of a particular author or work could cross paths with that name or title simply by using our website. this is how our humanist studies & the digital age frau & gragnani 4.1 (2015) 104 thematic approach comes into play: we selected an expandable series of feature subjects that allows for an increased visibility of these authors. this enables us to investigate specific questions from a literary, legal, sociological, political, and historical point of view, in order to map these women’s involvement and influence in the intellectual and social debates of their time. to begin with (once again, we are planning to expand this initial list in the future), our list of themes includes: pseudonyms; public sphere; adultery; religion; family; divorce; rape; fashion and cross-dressing; motherhood; work and profession; sexual orientation; humor; war; representations of female intellectuals in mainstream (visual and literary) culture; science, travel and cultural otherness. how does this work? suppose a scholar is conducting research on how divorce legislation affected women. s/he can use our search tool and, typing ‘divorce’ obtain the following results:  a clickable list of authors (with individual biographical entries and iconography, if available) who wrote about divorce in italy during the period under consideration, in fictional and non-fictional works: for example, anna franchi, grazia deledda and jolanda.  a clickable list of works about divorce: for example, deledda’s novel dopo il divorzio (1902) anna franchi’s avanti il divorzio (1902) and jolanda’s book of manners eva regina (1907). links to full digital text, when available.  secondary sources: scholarly papers, books, specialized websites. links to full digital text, again, when available.  legal and social history: a file with the legal and social history of divorce in italy with relevant bibliography and links to legal documents and legislation, when available.  a list (and digital text, when available) of contemporary works on divorce from countries other than italy. for example, carmen de burgos’ el divorcio en españa (1904). one of the aims of our project is to contribute to close the gap between digital and traditional scholarship. for instance, the kind of search we described allows for a cross-referenced view of the topic of divorce in italian literature, history, legal history, and cultural studies. interdisciplinary and transnational connections become instantly visible, and new ways of data interpretation are possible without laborious library and archival investigations. women at the end of the nineteenth century acted as agents of change, a fact that was ignored, obscured, and even ridiculed. quantitative and qualitative data analysis collected through a project like ours will provide an effective mapping of this phenomenon and explain (and visualize) the link between women and society at the turn of the twentieth century. specifically, it is a common assumption that late nineteenth century italian women writers expressed conservative positions on family issues. when searching ‘divorce’, in-visiblewomen.org users will see how many of them actually were proor against divorce and why. such a search might lead to unexpected results, thus stimulating new approaches and views on women. case in point, jolanda, a staunch catholic, was pro-divorce, while neera was not. humanist studies & the digital age frau & gragnani 4.1 (2015) 105 project implementation, dissemination, and (technical and financial) challenges our project is an expandable collaborative platform for scholars of italian and gender studies, for scholars of material culture, historians and art historians, for anthropologists and sociologists and, last but not least, for students. with regards to students, we have started collaborating with student assistants who are conducting research on the various themes and aspects of material culture and compiling entries, thus developing their own research skills and agenda. in sum, we want to be facilitators of a virtual laboratory of ideas, a community of thinkers and researchers, but also a venue for everyone interested in the material culture of italian women writers and their participation in the public sphere. this environment is ideal to ensure such collaboration, exchange of ideas, access, data collection, organization, visualization and interpretation. we were encouraged by existing projects and by early, successful efforts to create digital archives, such as the dartmouth dante project (1982) and the princeton dante project (1999) recently cited by robert hollander in the virtual pages of this journal, and by the decameron web (1994-1995). these projects brought italian literature online, and they are not just databases, but also interpretive, collaborative platforms that have changed the course of humanistic studies and have brought the reader’s attention back to the text. but when we turn to women’s studies the situation is different. while, in the anglo-american world, digital women’s studies are a consolidated reality,8 in the world of italian letters things are different: at this point, there have been several attempts at cataloguing and collecting data on women and women’s literature. among them, in italy, we should acknowledge the enciclopedia delle donne,9 a big endeavor that aims at including bio-bibliographical entries on all women, of all eras, professions and cultures; patrizia zambon’s le autrici della letteratura italianabibliografia dell’otto/novecento;10 letteratura dimenticata,11 developed by maria enrica carbognin, anna levi and lia madorsky. in the united states, a pioneer project is the university of chicago’s italian women writers project12 directed by catherine mardikes, elissa weaver and courtney quaintance. in-visiblewomen.org aims at a more focused, analytical, interdisciplinary and content oriented structure. with respect to the above-mentioned websites, our project aims not only to collect data, but also to analyze and interpret information and provide tools that allow such analysis. the quantitative questions that prompted our project have to do with the need for statistics for women’s magazines and books and with issues related to the location and accessibility of correspondence and archives. our theoretical questions stem from one main concern: how can data retrieval, organization, and visualization help challenge assumptions and generalizations for female intellectuals of the time? can received knowledge of these authors’ conservative behavior be questioned through digital scholarship? if so, how? through which channels did women 8 one example are the projects included in the university of virginia’s project nines, http://www.nines.org 9 http://www.enciclopediadelledonne.it 10 http://www.maldura.unipd.it/italianistica/ali/principale.html 11 http://www.letteraturadimenticata.it 12 http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/iww http://www.nines.org/ http://www.enciclopediadelledonne.it/ http://www.maldura.unipd.it/italianistica/ali/principale.html http://www.letteraturadimenticata.it/ http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/iww humanist studies & the digital age frau & gragnani 4.1 (2015) 106 participate in the intellectual debate? how did they ‘materially’ access those channels? how did they contribute to shape the new (modern) woman’s identity? we discussed how we could analyze and answer these questions through a website that could guarantee access, interpretation, and collaboration on an interdisciplinary level. this is how our project was born. although the project, at this stage, involves a limited number of people (the authors, students, it experts), our aim, once it has launched, is to create a working group that includes colleagues at institutions in the us and abroad. in particular, we are going to form an editorial board to select and peer review material submitted to invisiblewomen.org, and a circle of contributors. as invisiblewomen.org grows, we anticipate to expand the initial circle and involve other scholars in data collection, organization, website maintenance, and planning. so far, the biggest challenge has been our (very) limited institutional support. although most american universities are encouraging their faculty members to turn to digital humanities for both teaching and research projects, a lot of them do not yet have the infrastructure and the staff needed to implement such projects. our two institutions, both in the northeastern united states, belong to this category. while there has been quite a lot of moral support and enthusiasm for our project, we have spent long months trying to navigate the system with scarce results. since digital humanities are indeed the future, as demonstrated by wonderfully innovative projects at various campuses such as those at the university of oregon, the university of virginia, brown, harvard, the university of southern california, stanford, to mention a few, most schools are coming to terms with the challenges and financial commitment needed to turn a traditional campus into a 2.0 reality. we are finally seeing some success and we are now actively developing our project on an omeka platform. we believe that omeka offers the necessary flexibility for a complex project such as ours. so far, our project has been met with great enthusiasm among colleagues at institutions in the us and europe. we are at work on several grant applications in the hope to secure adequate financial support to sustain our project. works cited amalfitano, paolo and loretta innocenti. scene, itinerari, dimore. lo spazio nella narrativa del ‘700. rome: bulzoni, 1995. bassanini, gisella. tracce silenziose dell’abitare. la donna e la casa. milan: francoangeli, 1990. bompiani, ginevra. lo spazio narrante: jane austen, emily brönte, sylvia plath. milan: la tartaruga, 1978. elshtain, jean bethke. public man, private woman: women in social and political thought. princeton: princeton u. p., 1981. feminism, the private and the public. ed. joan b. landes. new york: oxford u. p., 1998. flanders, julia, and jacqueline wernimont. “feminism in the age of digital archives: the women writers project”, tulsa studies in women’s literature, 29.2 (2010): 425-435. gagliani, daniela and mariuccia salvati. la sfera pubblica femminile: percorsi di storia delle donne in età contemporanea. bologna: clueb, 1992. --. donne e spazio nel processo di modernizzazione. bologna: clueb, 1995. humanist studies & the digital age frau & gragnani 4.1 (2015) 107 girls’ secondary education in the western world: from the 18th to the 20th century. eds. j. goodman, r. rogers, j.c. albisetti. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2010. hollander, robert. “the princeton dante project.” humanist studies & the digital age. 3.1 (2013): 53-59. web. iannella, velia. gli spazi oscuri della metropoli. un viaggio misterioso nell’immaginario di oscar wilde. rome: gruppo albatros il filo, 2011. king, martha. grazia deledda: a legendary life. leicester: troubadour, 2005. l’educazione delle donne, ed. s. soldani. milan: franco angeli, 1991. marcel proust. proust e lo spazio. atti della giornata di studi (15 ottobre 2009). eds. frigerio, a., and m. verna. milan: educatt università cattolica, 2009. raccontare e descrivere: lo spazio nel romanzo dell’ottocento. eds. f. fiorentino, r. ceserani. rome: bulzoni, 1997. humanist studies & the digital age, 7.1 (2022) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda/7.1.2 1 education, technology, and humans: an interview with jeffrey schnapp interview with jeffrey schnapp by art farley and massimo lollini we are interested in learning about the creative, intellectual, and pedagogical aspects of your work in the digital humanities and artificial intelligence. we are especially intrigued by the breadth of your interests and the overall vision present in your teaching and research activities. you started your career as a scholar of dante and then have done pioneering work in the domains of media, knowledge design, digital arts and humanities, robotics, and curatorial practice in museums. is there a common thread running through all these activities and interests? there are a series of common threads, but they were never woven together as part of a plan. rather, they emerged over an extended period of time only to merge late in the course of my career. so, what may have been separate threads of enthusiasm, interest, engagement, and commitment came together late in the game. among these were an interest in computing that goes back to high school years; a passion for languages (i grew up bilingually in mexico but also studied several other foreign languages); and a commitment to creative practice (my minor as an undergrad was studio art; for three years between undergraduate and graduate studies i was a visual artist; i continued working as an illustrator during the first two years of my phd). do you believe that your initial activity as a scholar of dante and the middle ages played a significant role in modeling and carrying out your current work in digital humanities and artificial intelligence? how? there’s a direct connection to the degree that my first position was at dartmouth college where, thanks to the legacy of john kemeny’s presidency (he was the creator of basic), the kiewitt computing center was a stateof-the-art hub for the entire campus. it was for this reason that robert hollander sought to house the dartmouth dante project not as his home institution (princeton) but at mine; bob was very generous in this regard and needed an on-site associate director with both dantean and computational chops. i was in the right place at the right time, so i soon found myself as part of the leadership of the first digital humanities project ever funded by the national endowment for the humanities in 1983. this said, it was my teacher john freccero whose brilliance and erudition drew me into the field of dante studies and away from 20th century studies. for all its significance as a reference tool (that has endured to this day), the ddp was for me only a steppingstone. it confirmed in me the conviction that computational tools and techniques could play a decisive role in the future of all knowledge forms, including the humanistic, but building reference tools is laborious and, to be frank, unsexy. my main passions at the time were for interpretive cultural-historical work across the literary/visual divide within the fields of medieval studies and early 20 th century studies. in your current teaching of medieval literature do you use digital technologies? http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ humanist studies & the digital age schnapp, farley, and lollini 7.1 2022 2 i do. but more as supports than as a research methodology. i am currently running a graduate seminar on dante and material culture to an audience that is scattered across five universities on two continents. some of the units are built around research on medieval inventories and manuscript collections with which it would be impossible to interact in analog fashion. manuscript studies and codicology have benefitted enormously from high quality digitization efforts undertaken by some of the world’s leading libraries. how do you think the current technology available to academia has influenced teaching and research in medieval studies? can you give some examples? it is important to underscore the fact that classicists and medievalists, not modernists, led the way in developing digital platforms and tools in the humanities fields. the first so-called “digital humanist”—i don’t much like the label “digital humanities” for reasons that i will explain—was father roberto busa, the developer of the index thomisticus thanks to a friendship with thomas j. watson, the founder of ibm, dating back to 1949! likewise, resources like the perseus project, led by greg crane, date back to the mid-1980s and reflect the special challenges that led premodern fields of research (such as archeology) to develop a strong appetite for innovation. as far as literature and modern art are concerned, you have conducted significant research on italian futurism. your book futurpiaggio seems to act very well as a point of contact between research on futurism and works on a.i. and digital humanities. what value do you attribute to this research for the development of your work in digital humanities and artificial intelligence? it’s hard for me to sort out which came first, but i became fascinated with futurist art and poetry when i was a high school student and carried this interest forward into my undergraduate work at vassar college (studying with linda nochlin among others), my art practice (which relied upon the use of projections and site-specific constructions), and a love for engineering (motors and electronics). in most ways, futurism (and marinetti in particular) were naïve regarding technics and the mechanical realm; but their insights, later enriched and expanded upon by marshall mcluhan, on the cognitive shifts that are triggered by the ever-intensifying human/machine interactions that characterize the machine age captured my attention. i have never been interested in engineering or computation per se; rather my interests lie in what, in technical and design circles, are referred to as “human factors”: how can one design meaningful human/robot or human/data interactions? how do such interactions reshape the boundaries of that form of fast thinking that is known as “intuition”? how do futurism and piaggio represent a particularly significant observatory for discerning the radical changes that are introduced in our daily life by artificial intelligence? as hinted, futurism had one important insight in this domain: a complex and even self-contradictory understanding of the machine as at once self and other with respect to the human: as human prosthesis and enemy double of the human, as both primitive and advanced. whereas philosophers stretching back to descartes and moving forward through enlightenment materialists like la mettrie to the late 19 th century prophets of progress all celebrated the technical as the rational and functional, and all shared the dream of a simple coalescence between man-as-machine and human-fabricated machines, futurism scripts a far more interesting (if ultimately destructive) scenario. it is, after all, a racing car—not a model t—whose hood is humanist studies & the digital age schnapp, farley, and lollini 7.1 2022 3 adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath” that is “more beautiful than the victory of samothrace” according to the founding manifesto of futurism. and that very vehicle delivers its driver not to a destination, but rather delivers a promise/threat of ecstasy and/or death. the resulting struggle between human and machine gives rise to an understanding of the human/machine complex as generative in character: as an engine for new sensations, new limit experiences, new modes of vision. aspects of this vision were already becoming outdated by the end of world war i, but when marinetti celebrates “the death of time and space” (with telegraphy as an early form of telepresence in mind), he was intuiting the kind of telecommunications revolution that has had us telecommuting over the past year. piaggio is a quite a different story. though i’m a dedicated cyclist and motorcyclist, my role is that of the co-founder of piaggio fast forward, the robotics wing of the piaggio group, where we are building mobility platforms for the century after futurism’s dreams of perpetual acceleration and hypermobility long ago collapsed into rubble. the catastrophic consequences of automobile-centric models of urbanism and development on the quality of life and on the planet challenge us to rethink the future of mobility and urban design. while the speeds of land, sea, and air transportation began stalling out in the 1980s, connectivity and communications speeds have continued to accelerate. so how do we leverage these networks to move about the world better, more meaningfully, and more sustainably? how do we reconnect to the local in a globally interconnected world? the answers to such questions, in my view, lie in developing new mobility ecosystems for a post-automobile society. here brilliant mid-20th century precedents like the vespa scooter still have something to teach us. what are the lessons they can teach us for the future? it seems that a particularly important point for you is the notion of "movability". what do you mean by this? in the case of futurism, however provocative, the lessons as largely negative. in the case of piaggio’s illustrious history of innovation, the lessons are positive, but it’s not a matter of repeating or improving upon existing light mobility vectors. rather, it’s a matter of developing entirely new smart electric vehicle typologies that can work alongside bicycles and e-scooters, and are aligned with the core values that we believe in. piaggio fast forward is built on a bold, green, and anything-but-futurist premise: the future of mobility is walking (but walking with smart follow-me transporters like the gita robot that, along with an embrace of such urban concepts as superblocks and the “15 minute city”, make pedestrianism a viable mobility choice). you have recently curated an expanded reprint of blueprint for counter education a significant work of radical pedagogy originally published in 1970 and integrated into the design of the critical studies curriculum at calarts. what attracts you to this work by maurice stein and larry miller? i am impatient person and struggle with the risk aversiveness and slow pace of innovation within the world that i love and work in: the university world. this has led to a longstanding interest in the history of radical and experimental pedagogy. from the laboratory of constructivism to the bauhaus to black mountain college to 1960s activist pedagogies of the sort propagated by maury stein… this is a genealogy that is aligned with the hands-on, creative/critical, experimental ethos of the two labs that i have built and led: the stanford humanities lab (1999-2009) and metalab (at) harvard (2011-present). i’m an avid reader/admirer of gianni rodari and have been putting together a book on bruno munari for several years now. what were the principles on which their vision of a “counter education” was based? humanist studies & the digital age schnapp, farley, and lollini 7.1 2022 4 stein and his student miller were part of the free university movement. they sought to devise a practice-based counter-pedagogy to the conservative models that were then prevalent in american universities. in so doing, they drew upon a wide range of methods from the bauhaus studio to the activist teach-in (and maintained close connections to 1960s protest movements). the overall framework of their “blueprint” is easy enough to explain: to bring herbert marcuse’s critique of advanced capitalism into alignment with mcluhan’s celebration of the emancipatory potential of electronic media. the alignment was conceived of in the form of a boxed set that could be unfolded into an exploratory environment: three posters that mapped emerging architectures of knowledge and social practice, plus a “shooting script” that contains an instruction set for performing the posters supported by a database of readings of significance (represented by one hundred tables of content). blueprint was conceived of not as a “plan,” “map,” “guide,” or “answer” but rather as a perpetual work in progress, an immersive environment that seeks to activate the learner. do you recognize yourself in these principles? what does educational innovation mean for you? yes and no. yes, to the degree that i share its emphasis on process rather than product when it comes to imagining effective pedagogy. yes, also inasmuch as the project resulted in a beautiful and unique print artifact endowed with a number of forward-looking features. (i note in passing that blueprint served as the basis for the design of the humanities programs at calarts in 1970-1972, the years when stein served as dean of critical studies there.) no, for a variety of reasons, among them the fact that blueprint remains very much a product of its era. it has blind spots (omitting any reference to feminism, for instance); there’s a psychedelic era naiveté to some of its assumptions; it’s a vibrant messy counterculture hand grenade that points to questions regarding the intersection between knowledge, power, and authority without really addressing them in a sustained fashion. you are the director of the metalab and collaborator with the berkman klein center for internet and society at harvard. could you discuss a couple of projects at the metalab that you think have implemented an innovative pedagogy especially well? i believe in bringing together brain and hand, thinking and making, in arts and humanities education, no, in education writ large. i also believe in the importance of collaborative teaching and establishing a classroom where the “professor” is, among many other things, the learner in chief. along these lines, a few years back, metalab rolled out a series of hands-on humanities studio courses in which the attributes of the seminar were intermingled with those of the design studio. one was dedicated to researching, curating, and interpreting the part of bernard berenson’s photographic archive dedicated to lost works of the italian renaissance; another to the question of future models of scholarly communication (what i refer to as “knowledge design”). with two colleagues (an architect and a designer) i am currently running an experimental online program for the museo madre in naples entitled museofuturo which is dedicated to training young professionals from various backgrounds in the field of “experimental museology.” the course concludes with a student authored, collaboratively produced instant book. to what extent do the changes taking place in the education system today also depend on the creation and use of digital laboratories and interactive electronic classrooms that offer the opportunity to https://metalabharvard.github.io/ https://cyber.harvard.edu/ humanist studies & the digital age schnapp, farley, and lollini 7.1 2022 5 practice new pedagogical models based on active learning and interactions between students and teachers? technology provides no answers in and of itself; it only opens up new possibilities. classroom technology might just as well not be there at all if we are pouring old practices into shiny new bottles. active learning is a great idea and a great hook, but it needs to be deep and sustained. tech doesn’t provide that depth or sustenance. imaginative and innovative course design and teaching methodologies can. according to some critics of digital innovation, the marked use of technology in education can become the source of new problems. leaving aside the misleading idea of “technological determinism” can technology in education play a positive role in this innovative process? of course, digital innovation can play both a positive role and can give rise to new problems. but there’s too much technodeterminism implicit in the question itself. tools and technologies don’t provide the answers; teachers and institutions do. they have to start by focusing on what they wish to achieve, on their core values, on locating those valueadded domains where technology does open up transformative possibilities. if tech is being viewed as a mere support, it is being viewed, as it were, from the outside. whatever transformative potential exists can only be tapped if you get in under the hood, experiment, take chances, dare to fail, stretch your limits. this implies retraining teachers and researchers. how do your projects and teaching activities align or differ from those promoted by other academic institutions in the united states? is there a distinctive feature in what you do? for example, many universities have created a digital project around dante. you do not seem to have followed this path. why? what do you think of these projects? that’s a very hard question. compared with other so-called “digital humanities” ventures, metalab is to some degree anomalous. we are part of the berkman klein center (where creative commons and the digital public library of america were incubated) but physically located in harvard’s graduate school of design; but we interact with harvard as a whole. neither the word “digital” nor the word “humanities” is in our name. we define ourselves instead as “an idea foundry, a knowledge design laboratory, and a production studio.” we are especially engaged by questions regarding the future of libraries, museums, and archives; more drawn to the critical and creative media practice than to digital literary studies; and maintain a strong commitment to environmental and social justice projects as well as to playful remediations of print. i have nothing against the creations of web-based resources like the projects that you allude to; needless to say, i welcome them and make use of them in my teaching. most fall under the domain of supports; i wouldn’t describe them as “digital humanities.” over the past few decades, we have seen the creation of electronic books, digital repositories, textual and visual databases, digital archives, and hypertext projects based on the great texts and authors of the western literary tradition. the most evident consequence of these changes is the increased humanist studies & the digital age schnapp, farley, and lollini 7.1 2022 6 circulation and availability of literary texts. do you believe that this phenomenon is horizontal, in the sense that it affects all social strata and the different areas of the world? absolutely. just look at the analytics. online content on sites like the gutenberg project and internet archive, and on platforms like khan academy is being accessed from all over the world, particularly areas of the developing world where libraries resources are scarce. or do you think that after all the change is quite real only in the sense that it concerns the same categories of people and world areas that were interested in western literary tradition already before the technological changes? i disagree: the democratizing impact of these projects is real. again, the analytics demonstrate an expansion, at once geographic and demographic, despite the asymmetries in access to bandwith and connectivity. the digital divide is, of course, real; but let’s not overestimate its impact given the role that everything from cell phone networks to public libraries are playing in democratizing at least limited access. at the same time, the increased circulation of literary works is not in itself a positive factor. indeed, as many critics maintain, the uncontrolled circulation of literary works on the internet often corresponds to a “distortion” of those texts. in your opinion, what are the most suitable criteria for evaluating the value of literary works published online? it depends what you mean by “value” and “published online.” the criteria will necessarily vary according to your definition of value and your target audience. if we are talking here about analog books that have been scanned and run through ocr, there is, of course, a need to ensure accuracy and the formal integrity of such works. but this is a relatively trivial matter in most cases. there’s notion inherently more noble about a print object or a digital file; it’s just that their ontologies are different. what contribution can the internet and digital technology make, if any, in creating an educated literary audience in the global network environment? my answer may not please some readers, but i don’t think it is the responsibility of the internet or digital technology to create “an educated literary audience”; that is the responsibility of social and political institutions. the internet is a tool, just like an analog library is a tool. it can be used for a legion of ends, constructive and destructive. for a moment let us consider the world of journalism and newspapers. some critics hold that more information in circulation does not necessarily result in a more informed citizenry. do you think that digital technology has increased the number of readers and changed the way people read newspapers? more information in circulation has never “necessarily resulted in a more informed citizenry”; this was just as true in the pre-digital world of scandal sheets and tabloids as it is true today. there are more readers or information grazers than ever, but that doesn’t guarantee being “better informed.” again, let me insist: in contemporary polemics we grant too much agency to the technology and pay too little attention to our public institutions. the technology doesn’t do this to us; it’s our society, with all its humanist studies & the digital age schnapp, farley, and lollini 7.1 2022 7 pathologies and asymmetries that interprets and shapes the media ecosystem that it has, quite literally, at its fingertips. there was never a “classical” era of the newspaper, contrary to the nostalgic ruminations of some and the newspaper as print artifact is mostly on its death bed. however distinctive their present form, news bubbles and filters are hardly the creation of social media or online news networks. they may operate on vaster scales, churn more quickly, and be characterized by an accelerated “virality,” but the news ecosphere that preceded them (extending back to the early twentieth century and beyond) wasn’t more democratic or pluralistic or enlightened. it was slower, to be sure, and far more centralized, in the hands of a small circle of far-from-illuminated elites. who would you prefer as your news gatekeeper: william randolph hearst, axel springer, rupert murdoch, or an algorithm? of the four, i’d probably choose the algorithm. it’s easier to disrupt, manipulate, and it can be far more easily rewritten. do you see any noteworthy projects in the world of digital journalism? many. i think very highly of and support propublica, but also think very highly of the sort of experimental work being done at the new york times, among other places, devising new database storytelling modes. how do you see the future of print newspapers in the global network paradigm? i repeat, they are on their death bed. print has a glorious future under digital conditions. but not newspapers. if the information that you rely upon to sell your product is to be evaluated on the basis of its informational “freshness”, print is (relatively) slow and electronic media are near instantaneous. this same conundrum does not apply to books (or, at least, beautiful books) and magazines (or, at least, beautifully print produced magazines). as i have written elsewhere, “it is synchrony that prevails in cultural history. old media don’t go away: they mutate. as the first centuries of books roll off the presses, scriptoria move from churning out lecture notes to crafting luxury pocket editions of multicolor illuminated prayer books. microforms flourish alongside industrial-era books. moleskine notebooks proliferate alongside laptops. since the advent of the world wide web, more books continue to be printed than ever during the pre-internet era (and many of these are selfpublished books, a direct product of the democratization of access to publishing platforms).” digital technology has helped transform contemporary libraries and the very idea of book. you developed a project on this subject, the library beyond the book, with your colleague matthew battles. what are the most significant changes that you see now? the title hints at one major shift in emphasis: libraries need to be about connections at least as much as they are about collections. this means thinking about the library as civic platform and key link in the knowledge distribution system. libraries are more important than ever in the digital age. what other changes do you envision for the book of the future? i recently wrote the concluding chapter to the oxford illustrated history of the book, so it’s impossible for me to sum up a complex historical argument in a few sentences. but the book has never been a single or a static object; just as it has undergone constant changes in the course of its history, it will continue to undergo such changes. but the books that will matter (and sell) will be books that double down on the physicality (i.e. tactility, https://www.propublica.org/ http://jeffreyschnapp.com/2013/09/28/the-library-beyond-the-book/ humanist studies & the digital age schnapp, farley, and lollini 7.1 2022 8 beauty, design) of the book object. if a book is a mere information container, there’s no compelling reason for it not to live online. most university press books don’t pass this test, by the way. much of your work takes place in a markedly interdisciplinary perspective also through the curation of museum exhibitions such as bz '18 -'45 (the documentation center built under marcello piacentini's monument to victory in bolzano / bozen) or collaboration with institutes such as critical media practice at harvard that promotes innovative research using media practices in which written language may only play a part. can you tell us briefly about these initiatives? so, bz ’18-’45 is the exhibition space and documentation center located under piacentini’s fascist monument: the first true fascist monument and a focal point of cultural-political conflict in the alto adige region since the time of its construction (1926-1928). at the time of the restoration of the monument, i was selected as part of the team assigned the task of re-imagining the monument’s place within the city. working with archivists and historians, we devised a hybrid itinerary combining a) an interactive experience within the mausoleum that lies right beneath the monument with b) a gallery tour that unfolds two interwoven narratives: one describes the life of bolzano between the end of wwi and wwii; the other, the life of the monument itself, from the time that mussolini commissioned it to the present. we also developed a somewhat startling external intervention: a luminous led ring that spins around one of the columns of the façade of the original monument, symbolically re-wedding it to the city of bolzano. the documentation center now draws some 30-50 thousand visitors a year (or at least it did until the pandemic). critical media practice is a phd minor in the faculty of arts and sciences at harvard, so i work with a number of the students in the program as advisor, usually on the multimedia components to their thesis projects. it’s a terrific program that allows for experimental and expressive add-ons to even the most conventional doctoral theses. how do they fit into your research? the tend to align very closely with metalab’s activities in various modes. numerous cmp students collaborate with metalab, even if there’s no formal connection between the two entities. what role does digital technology play in this context? a considerable role, though some cmp projects involve little more than filmmaking or videography. are there any forms of knowledge or cultural production today that aren’t in some significant part digital? i pose this question only because it’s the very reason i’m not fond of the phrase “digital humanities.” however useful that label has proven, it wrongly implies that the digital (i.e. technology) is driving the train. in fact, the digital is simply a constitutive feature of contemporary culture and knowledge production in all domains. it’s the air that we breathe, the setting within which we pose and answer questions. for this very reason we wouldn’t speak of digital biology or physics. our journal is particularly interested in studying the changes in the way of reading following the advent of digital technology and the use of artificial intelligence in the analysis of literary texts. we are thinking here not only to different forms of distant reading as conceived by franco moretti but https://www.monumenttovictory.com/en.html https://afvs.fas.harvard.edu/ https://afvs.fas.harvard.edu/ humanist studies & the digital age schnapp, farley, and lollini 7.1 2022 9 also to unsupervised machine reading of literary texts or to the scientific research which is nowadays directed to push back the brain’s speed barrier and read with greater speed and efficiency. the team at the laboratory for visual learning – a collaboration of scientists from university of massachusetts boston, mit, and harvard, that included matthew h. schneps among others – stands for a significant example of this direction. for sure, the acceleration of reading processes produces not only benefits in society and the academic field but also a certain methodological and pedagogical uncertainty. are there noteworthy results made possible by these new practices? naturally, but it all depends what you mean by “reading.” in the literary-historical fields, “reading” is a word that, as you know well, has usually been associated with qualitative methodologies. ai has shown great prowess in quantitative modes of reading, but i have my doubts regarding its qualitative potential. i’m not sure it’s the right hammer to drive that nail into a wood beam. this said, the quantitative is immensely powerful and can become intertwined with qualitative methods in productive ways, as moretti’s work, at its best, demonstrates. speed and efficiency can provide certain kinds of insights at scale, but your research questions have to operate on that very scale. they possess considerable limitations as well, especially when one is working with small corpora. in my view, the real challenge involves the merger of quantitative and qualitative methods. what has really changed in practices of reading in our time beyond the apocalyptic fears disseminated by staunch defenders of traditional reading or the overly euphoric expectations of technology and artificial intelligence gurus? reading practices in history are a moving target. our era is no exception in this regard. there’s no doubt that screen reading is a more rhizomatic, non-linear mode of navigating texts than is conventional, codex-based reading. but, as eye tracking studies and cognitive science have repeatedly demonstrated, even conventional reading proves far less linear than we usually imagine. have you practiced, or do you know significant experiences and in this regard? as noted earlier, i have always steered metalab toward work with visual corpora, rather than textual ones, because i continue to see greater promise in this domain particularly with regard to the application of ai-based and machine learning techniques to their analysis. to conclude the interview, we would now like to take a closer look at the theme of artificial intelligence and its consequences. information technology, robotics, and a.i. have taken over many activities once performed only by humans, from spreadsheet calculations to pattern recognition, from playing chess and go, to translations, investment decisions, driving, and so on. are there specific metalab initiatives that make use of a.i. that you are particularly fond of? the project that comes to mind is entitled curatorial a(i)gents and it involves the critical and creative use of aibased techniques to explore new modes of knowledge production and experience creation in the museological domain. as the project title suggests, it merges two words and two worlds—the human and the computational—in the form of a suite of co-curated experiments pairing an artificial intelligence with a human curator/creator. first presented at the ars electronica festival in linz in september 2020, curatorial a(i)gents https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/dyslexia/lvl/ https://metalabharvard.github.io/projects/curatorial-aigents/ humanist studies & the digital age schnapp, farley, and lollini 7.1 2022 10 is scheduled to open at the harvard art museum later in 2021 for a ten-week run. it’s only a first step: i have a number of other ai-based tricks up my sleeve that build on this initial experiment. what is essential to these future projects is the notion of curatorial practice, analysis, argument, and storytelling on a macro scale that involves collaboration between computational methods and human expertise. what do you consider the most likely and relevant new capabilities and scope of ai and robotics that await us in the next 10 years? as just stated, i’d like to draw us away from substitutive logics, whether it’s the notion that ai is a rival intelligence to human intelligence—the word “intelligence” means something fundamentally different in the two phrases— or the persistent but historically sticky dream of building humanoid robots (which, as i argued at the modena festivalfilosofia this year, leads not just to a profound misunderstanding of the robotic but also to robots that routinely fail). rather than substitutive models, i believe in collaborative models that leverage human expertise and general intelligence in the service of the expanded universe of action that ai and robotics imply. ai will surely reshape many domains of labor (including, for instance, medical diagnostics) just as robotics will increasingly invade our domestic spaces. but robots will forever remain useful appliances, not human doppelgangers. the emergence of a.i. and of robotics is the result of complex interactions among technological, social, cultural, political, legal, and economic forces. theorists like hans moravec in his books on the future of robots and a.i., hold that before 2050, robots will evolve to become a new super-intelligent species. what do you see as the factors that eventually will limit the reach and abilities of ai? i’m going to repeat myself here, but bear with me. artificial intelligence is not an “intelligence” of the generalized, fluid, flexible sort we usually understand when humans speak of intelligence; ai can do extraordinary things on expanded scales, but relies upon data architectures, forms of abstraction, and structures of dependency that bear little resemblance to the textured, multisensory percepta that feed human intelligence, not to mention critical reasoning. the same goes for machine learning which isn’t “learning” in the conventional sense. it works best on well-bounded problems tackled by slogging through enormous training data sets: a large deep-learning model typically consumes the equivalent of the lifetime emissions of five automobiles. pattern recognition at scale is its strength. but pattern recognition isn’t thinking; it’s only a first steppingstone towards thought, many steps removed from critical thought. so, these are powerful tools but, like all tools, they do some things well (especially at more-than-human scales) and other things poorly. what are the most important challenges for society posed by a.i.? transparency and bias, first and foremost. at the racetrack you can look under the hood of any race car to see if the owner broke the rules, installing, for instance, a nitromethane supercharger. data systems are expert systems, opaque to the vast majority of people who operate them and whom they affect. they require rigorous and well-informed regulatory frameworks that expose the values and assumptions that underlie them. unfortunately, most of our politicians remain digital ignoramuses. humanist studies & the digital age schnapp, farley, and lollini 7.1 2022 11 how must humans adapt to these changes? to what extent is their intervention marginalized in artificial intelligence and robotics? as already noted, i don’t accept the premise that ai and robotics aren’t just another set of tools, which is to say that they somehow compromise or compete with the human in new and unprecedented ways as compared with earlier technologies. i take the long (anthropological) view. just like the hammer turns every human into a hammerer, so machines like typewriters, telephones, and automobiles reshaped human cognition, culture, and society during the 20th century. likewise, the information age has bred new adaptive behaviors and metaphors (time as bandwidth, synch, download) that imagine the computational and the human as one. they aren’t however intimate the dance. some see significant differences in how artificial intelligence is conceived in the united states and in europe. for example, julian nida-rümelin and nathalie weidenfeld in their book digitaler humanismus: eine ethik für das zeitalter der künstlichen intelligenz) argue that there exists an ideology, a specific sylicon valley mindset, which would be countered by an idea of digital humanism with deep european roots. from this point of view, the ideology of silicon valley takes humanistic values as starting point and then transforms them into anti-humanistic utopias notwithstanding the genuine aspirations for the improvement of the human being. what is your view on this? do you agree with these ideas? i don’t really have a view on this debate which, i have to confess, i don’t really follow. i’m skeptical to two extents (but, again, this could be out of ignorance): first, the idea of a humanism with “deep european roots” coming to the rescue strikes me as problematic. that’s because renaissance humanism represents one of the key constitutive moments of the very anthropocentrism that is destroying the planet humanity depends on for its survival. so, to propose some sort of restoration of “humanism” under digital conditions strikes me as an odd gesture. i envisage the true challenge of the present as overcoming humanism precisely in the sense of going beyond anthropocentrism. as i argued in my modena talk, “the time has come for that image [of the human] to no longer be vitruvian man, humanity at the center of the circle of being, humanity as model and master, including of the world’s mechanical and computational extensions. rather that image needs to become one small vector within that vast circle of interdependent, interconnected forms that make up the circle of life… so that the robot may be about us to precisely the same degree as we ourselves are about the world.” second, i view the notion of “a specific silicon valley mindset” as a contemporary myth that treats many entangled but complex realities, distributed all over the globe, as if they were one. like any simplification, it provides a useful shorthand (but that’s about it). how does “silicon valley ai” relate to the study of humanities? ai has been with us for half a century now. it doesn’t belong to “silicon valley” any more than it belongs to dartmouth college where my former stanford colleague, john mccarthy, first coined the phrase, or to ibm, google, or deepmind. again, allow me to repeat myself: ai has the capacity to do extraordinary things on expanded scales, including things that involve cultural data sets, but it relies upon data architectures, forms of abstraction, and structures of dependency that bear little resemblance to the textured, multisensory percepta humanist studies & the digital age schnapp, farley, and lollini 7.1 2022 12 that feed human intelligence and culture. which means that the objects of study in the human sciences that ai can serve are new objects of study; they aren’t simply extensions of traditional modes of inquiry. often, they don’t even fall within the conventionally understood domain of the humanities. this is one of the reasons for my hesitancy with respect to the label “digital humanities”: once you begin working critically and creatively with data as a material and expressive medium, the boundary lines between natural/human/social science have a tendency to become pretty porous. finally, some brief remarks on "transhumanism" conceived as an end point or final goal of using ai. in the transhumanist declaration (2012) –signed by alexander chislenko, max more, natasha vitamore, and nick bostrom among others – we read: “we envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet earth. (…). we advocate the well-being of all sentience, including humans, non-human animals, and any future artificial intellects, modified life forms, or other intelligences to which technological and scientific advance may give rise.” what do you think of these claims? i’m guessing that i have already signaled my views in some earlier replies and, once again, shou ld add that i don’t follow this line of thinking. it’s hard to object to such ideals as “overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering”, so fine; but overcoming “our confinement to planet earth”? …confinement, hmm. that’s a word that sounds alarm bells for me. i love the desert. but the images from the perseverance rover of the surface of mars don’t quite suggest to me that space colonies are either the most plausible nor the most enticing “transhuman” future scenario. i think, on the contrary, that we need to shed the legacies of humanism in all its forms, particularly those which animate technocentricism, and grapple instead with our deeper entanglements with a natural world that we still barely understand. works cited moravec, hans. mind children. the future of robot and human intelligence. cambridge (mass.)/london: harvard university press, 1988. print. ---. robot. mere machine to transcendent mind. oxford: oxford university press, 2000. print. schnapp, jeffrey. futurpiaggio: 6 italian lessons about style on wheels. new york: rizzoli international publications, 2017. print. ---. “blueprint for a blueprint.” in maurice stein, larry miller, marshall henrichs, and eugenia bell. blueprint for counter education: curriculum, handbook, wall decoration, shooting script. , 2016. print. 4-35. schnapp, jeffrey, and matthew battles. the library beyond the book. cambridge, massachusetts: harvard university press, 2014. print. nida-rümelin, julian, and nathalie weidenfeld. digitaler humanismus: eine ethik für das zeitalter der künstlichen intelligenz. münchen: piper, 2020. print. alexander sasha chislenko, et al. “the transhumanist declaration.” in max, more and natasha vita-more. the transhumanist reader classical and contemporary essays on the science, technology, and philosophy of the human future. oxford: john wiley & sons, 2013. education, technology, and humans: an interview with jeffrey schnapp interview with jeffrey schnapp by art farley and massimo lollini works cited humanist studies & the digital age, 4.1 (2015) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.4.1.3685 circles: networks of reading massimo lollini, university of oregon tell all the truth but tell it slant / success in circuit lies / too bright for our infirm delight / the truth's superb surprise. emily dickinson, 506. reading is a neuronally and intellectually circuitous act, enriched as much by the unpredictable indirections of the reader’s inferences and thoughts, as by the direct message to the eye from the texts. wolf, proust and the squid 16 welcome to the fourth issue of humanist studies & the digital age. it continues the discourse started in the third issue, “textualities in the digital age”; this time we focus on the role of the reader in digital environments. an analysis of current digital projects follows the historical and theoretical premise. as marianne wolf remind us in her book deeply rooted in neuroscientific knowledge, “we were never born to read. human beings invented reading only a few thousand years ago” (proust and the squid, 3). this was one of the most extraordinary inventions in human history, responsible for altering the organization of human brain and the intellectual evolution of our species. reading is based on multiple cognitive processes, the most ancient of which were the visual areas in our ancestors’ brain that were responsible for object recognition. then the brain learned to make connections, circuits, and pathways between the visual areas and those responsible for linguistic processes, essential for the development of written language (14). this means our brain has to connect to older structures of vision and language to learn to read. while some of the cognitive processes involved in reading, like vision and speech, are genetically organized, reading in itself does not have “direct genetic program passing it to future generations” (11). this makes reading an activity particularly sensitive to each new type of writing system developed through the millennia of human history, causing different adaptations to the human brain. for the same reason, if we want to understand the actual condition and the future of reading it is important to understand the evolution of reading and writing systems through the centuries. to do so we need to adjourn, and for certain aspects suspend, the modern notions of author and book which have been considered crucial for both the writer and the reader since the age of printing. rather than limiting our attention to books and authors, we need to understand the evolution of the textualities involved in writing and reading and their circumstances. http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 2 the idea that authors do not write books but texts incarnated in different written objects including manuscripts, printed books, and electronic texts is becoming more and more familiar in our digital time. the familiarity with manuscripts and incunabula has long ago lead scholars to point out the necessity of distinguishing between physical materials and their supporting structure, such as the book, that are unique and singular and the "abstraction" that we refer to under the name "text," which is ideal and reproducible. as joseph dane writes in his the myth of print culture, “in the earliest printed books we have … there is not a single question in bibliographical or literary history that could not be considered a variant” (dane 9). for this reason we should be concerned above all with texts but at the same time take into the appropriate consideration their supporting structure as well. guglielmo cavallo and roger chartier in their introduction to a history of reading in the west emphasize that “reading is not already inscribed in the text” (1); the “meanings of texts depend on the forms and circumstances through which they are received and appropriated by their readers” (2). in other words, the crucial role of the reader in giving texts a meaning depends on the forms of writing and supporting structure through which the text is transmitted. cavallo and chartier go so far as to say that forms produce meaning and every change in support produces new meaning. therefore, the history of reading has to consider both the physical aspects of text and their readers practices, usually organized around what stanley fish calls “interpretative communities” (fish 147–174). 1. the reader from volumen to codex the first revolution in reading in early modernity is not related to the technological revolution in book production, but to the change in writing practices that took place in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. at that time the monastic model of writing and reading, which was related above all to a direct use in the monastery in the daily prayers read aloud, was progressively supplanted by the scholastic model of writing and reading that attributes a new value to the book as a tool for intellectual reflection and labor. illich has rightly emphasized a distinct correspondence between the newly laid-out page and the new setting for reading within the nascent universities that replaced monastic rituals with academic ones based on thought-through arguments (cavallo, chartier 24; ilich 25, 65, 99). these changes are related to the idea that writing is not related only to latin and lectio divina but can be used also to transcribe vernacular literature. from a technological point of view, this revolution follows from the new status of the page in the transformation of the support of writing and reading from the continuous volumen to the codex. before the transformation of the volumen in papyrus read horizontally (fig. 1-2) into the codex in the middle ages, the creation of the rotulus in parchment started a reading process perpendicular to the direction of the scroll (fig. 3). the page does not have autonomy of either the volumen or the rotulus. it remains confused with its support structure as an expression of intellectual rumination and temporal continuity. while the use of paper in place of parchment accompanied the emergence of vernacular literatures, the technological revolution of alphabetic writing and reading was enhanced and reinforced above all by the logic and structural organization of the codex as the earliest form of the book. the sacred dimension of the humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 3 divine lectio described for example by hugh of saint victor’s didascalicon, a work written in the first half of the twelfth century, was lost along with the monastic practice of group and vocal reading. hugh wrote his didascalicon de studio legendi to join the monks in praise of the richness and fruitfulness of this practice just as it was being eclipsed by the new technology of the book and the new practice of scholastic reading as a predominantly silent activity performed by individuals. cavallo and chartier have underlined the fundamental importance of the change from a ritualized and oralized reading to silent and reflective reading that was first made possible by the appearance of word separation in the lines of early medieval manuscripts (24). this change preceded the revolution of the codex and started the process of “disincarnating of the page” that will be taken to extremes by a book technology that progressively eliminated glosses, commentaries and any form of marginal text from the page. in the codex, the page ceased to be a continuous row of columns, a simple support of memory, providing the rhythm of the oral and public reading. instead, it became an independent visual entity with a rectangular format that is separate and discontinuous (zali 36-37). hugh still considered reading a physical activity, one in which all the body and the senses are involved. reading for him meant literally to embody the pages and the letters, triggering a fertility of sensory drives that would disappear in modern european languages and printed books (hugh of saint victor iii 1-12; illich 54). “page” in latin meant originally “vineyard”; hence the idea of reading as “harvesting grapes,” a motor and sensory activity related to spiritual elevation. in its mediterranean etymology – before becoming the page in black and white that we know from the printing age on, – the page was first of all pagina mundi, page-landscape, geographical space delimiting the cultivation area. the arbitrary limits of the page distinguished the natural surface from the space of writing, as “symbolic space of exchange” (illich 57; zali 26-27). the illuminated manuscript was like a medieval cathedral with all its colors and decorations. these elements progressively disappear in the page of the codex and new book format following the new indexing elements that created an abstract, bi-dimensional and disembodied space for reading. the visible page ceased to be the record of speech and a series of commentaries freely available to the reader. instead it became a space laid out by an author responsible for choosing the subject and the ordinatio. yet, as franco alessio has suggested, models of knowledge in the middle ages did not suppose the text to be intangible. in fact, the medieval scholastic method is based on the manipulation of texts. this happens in different ways as described by a famous quote from saint bonaventure’s commentarium in i librum sententiarum written in the thirteen century that explains the different meanings of book writing at that time. on the one hand, the copyist (scriptor) just transcribes the text of another without introducing changes; on the other hand, the compiler (compilator) cuts and pastes sections of texts of others giving them a logic order. furthermore, according to bonaventure, the commentator (commentator), who reproduces essential excerpts of texts of others and adds comments on how to interpret them, represents a third example of book writing. finally, the author (auctor) creates new texts employing the texts of others only inasmuch as they confirm the authorial discourse. the prevalent dimension of these reading and writing practices as conceived by the scholastic method is based on disarticulating the texts of others and humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 4 interposing them with different citations that are re-ordered, glossed and commentated, mainly for studying and/or preservation purposes. against this, the benedectine monastic mode of reading was not aimed at preserving or understanding texts, but at preparing them for the use in monastic life and in this perspective was more inclined to preserve the texts in their integrity (buonaventure 14-15; alessio 102-103). the scholastic mode of reading is based on the lectio, performed to understand a text and ultimately to teach and learn. reading is here strictly connected to writing and performed in three basic stages. first comes the comprehension of the literal meaning of the text (littera) related to its grammatical structure; it corresponds to the exposition (expositio) of the text. whereas the monastic reading, not concerned with intellectual inquiry but with praying and contemplating, would stop here, scholastic reading considers the littera only the first step of the process of reading meant to approach the more complex layers of meaning of the text. thus, the second stage of reading in the scholastic method is represented by the attention to the meaning (sensus), which is more or less the plain explanation (explicatio) of the literal meaning of the text. finally, the last stage is meant to extract the essential core of the text, its doctrine or teaching (sententia). the sententia is the fundamental goal of reading in scholastic method; it will become the object of the preservation and transmission of knowledge in the nascent universities. interlinear glosses on the littera and the sensus, and marginal glosses and commentaries on the sententia are also important elements of the scholastic method. the auctoritas of the text is not related to its author but to the teachings that the reader is able to extract from it (alessio 109, 117). in this perspective, the scholastic method proceeds with quaestiones interrogating and challenging the texts and aims at collecting sententiae in summae and complilationes. ultimately, the compilationes emerge in the twelfth-century universities as an open textual form not based on an authorial voice; they are the result of the reader’s intervention into the texts. the medieval and scholastic way of writing, reading, and transmitting texts and cultural heritages represents a crucial achievement in the intellectual history of reading and for certain aspects an interesting and inspiring model for the second and third revolution in reading. 2. the reader in the network of printing and the places of reading the second “revolution in reading” of the early modern age arrived with the industrialization of printing. cavallo and chartier have questioned the traditional idea that this change corresponded to the evolution from an “intensive” to an “extensive” reading because extensive readers existed already before the printing revolution and intensive readers continued to exist after that (24-25). a good example of extensive reading that precedes the technological changes introduced by printing is the book wheel created by early humanists and perfected during the renaissance. one good exemplary was built in the second half of sixteenth century by italian engineer agostino ramelli (1531-ca.1600). the wheel of books is one of the many fantastic designs by ramelli, published in his diverse et artificiali machine (paris, 1588); it consists of a rotating lectern, designed to allow easy simultaneous reading of several texts. this rotating lectern allowed the provision of more books, and the passage from one to another by pressing a humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 5 foot pedal. in many ways, it is a mechanism that seems to anticipate the reading of hypertexts that was conceived centuries later during the third “revolution in reading” introduced by computer technology. la ruota dei libri by agostino ramelli illustrates very well the humanist way of reading, based on the collation of different texts and the consultation of several book at once. a technique of reading that constituted the foundation of the fundamental humanist activity: philology. see fig. 4. the commonplace book is another object that incarnated the model of humanist extensive reading before the printing age; it was based on collecting, comparing, ordering, and collating many different texts. giovanni boccaccio’s zibaldone laurenziano xxix 8 can be considered an early example; it is a miscellaneous work that includes latin and vernacular authors and points to how widely read boccaccio was.1 the zibaldone (or hodgepodge book) became a new form of book production in the fifteenth century in italy. these commonplace books were written in cursive scripts and contained an overwhelming variety of poetic and prose texts: literary texts, mostly of the three major figures of the florentine vernacular traditions, appeared side-by-side in no discernible order with lists of taxes paid, currency exchange rates, devotional texts, favorite quotes from virgil and augustine.2 commonplace books represent an important source for studying the emergence of a lay literature and interpreting merchants’ and artisans’ interaction with literary texts and visual arts during the renaissance (petrucci, writers and readers in medieval italy 185). figure 5 is taken from an early example of a merchant’s commonplace book, a manuscript on paper written in italian and latin with extracts in venetian, dating between 1350-1400. the book contains notes on arithmetic and accounting for merchandise, a romance of tristan, list of spices, astronomical and astrological information, prayers, recipes, and poems. on the other hand, the persistence of “intensive” reading after the printing revolution is well represented by the emergence of the novel in eighteenth century. die leiden des jungen werthers (the sorrows of young werther), an epistolary and lightly autobiographical novel by johann wolfgang von goethe, first published in 1774, is a good example of a secular work that engrossed its readers in the manner of a religious text. it is well known that this novel started the phenomenon the “reading mania”, a sentimental or emphatic form of reading based on emotional and individual responses (wittmann 295). the reading of chivalric romances in the middle ages and renaissance already triggered the imitation of the fictional action in real life. dante describes a famous example in the episode of paolo and francesca in canto v of the inferno. the two lovers were stimulated to kiss each other by reading in a chivalric romance the fictional kiss between guinevere, the wife of king arthur, and the knight lancelot. cervantes created the character of don quixote who reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his sanity, decides to set out to revive chivalry and bring justice to the world. nonetheless, the first form of mass imitation induced by reading novels was known as the werther-fieber (werther-fever), which conditioned young men throughout europe to 1 a hypertextual critical edition of boccaccio’s zibaldone laurenziano (pluteo xxix.8) is available at http://rmcisadu.let.uniroma1.it/boccaccio/. 2 a digitized collection of commonplace books is available in the harvard open collections at http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/reading/commonplace.html. http://rmcisadu.let.uniroma1.it/boccaccio/ http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/reading/commonplace.html humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 6 dress in the clothing style described for werther in the novel. the imitation went to the point of repeating werther’s suicide. an exemplary figure of this type of modern reader is gian of brughi, a minor character in italo calvino’s the baron in the tree (1957), a novel set in the enlightenment culture of eighteenth-century europe. gian of brughi, a brigand who avidly reads novels, ends up being hanged while reading henry fielding’s jonathan wild. his only concern at death is how the novel he is reading ends; he dies happy when, just before being hanged, he learns that jonathan wild at the end of fielding’s book is also hanged. still, one should note that, unlike events in the middle ages, in these modern cases the imitation of the literary models takes place in a new cultural context in which the authorial voice rises to importance. the modern reader does not accept the refusal of innovation behind the medieval compilations and commentaries, based on summaries and citations of classic authors, sectioned, re-arranged and commented upon. the printing revolution ushered in the modern idea of the author and the related concepts of originality and intellectual property, to which we are now very much attached. the large audience created by the printing revolution brought to the fore the paradoxical implications of making private thoughts public (eisenstein 229-230). the printing revolution coincided with the triumph of the bourgeoisie throughout europe and the emergence of a public sphere distinct from the court and the church. in the enlightenment, books and reading acquired an “emancipatory function” in the public consciousness (wittmann 287). moreover, only in the eighteenth century did people recognize the capacity of printed matter to “completely penetrate the reader’s subjective life” (watt, 184). the evolution of reading into an “individual process independent of social class” was another significant change introduced in the eighteenth century. in general, the “unruly form” of reading conceived as “naïve, non-reflexive and undisciplined” was predominant in this century. this form of reading was performed aloud by the rural population and among the urban lower classes (wittman 290). at the same time, the book became a cultural commodity, entered the capitalist market, and found new kinds of readers associated with new institutions such as the “lending library” and the “reading societies” (306). libraries gained more and more importance starting from eighteenth century as places and networks of reading. however, the principal location for reading remained the private room and the bourgeois living space. the eighteenth century did not forget some of the natural and agricultural implications related to the mediterranean etymology of the word “page”. as we saw earlier, the latin origin of pagina evokes the agricultural practice of delimiting a rectangular space for cultivating the vineyard. the columns included in the volumina evoked the rows of the vineyard showing how much the practice of writing and reading was connected to the natural environment. philosophical schools of antiquity praised very much the practice of reading in a natural setting, starting from the daily program of the pythagorean school that included solitary walks to natural places which had to be appropriately quiet for the disciple to gain the inner serenity necessary to converse and study (hadot 309 ff.). the reading mode in monasteries maintained the spiritual and contemplative meditation of ancient schools in the new christian setting. starting from twelfth century, the city humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 7 became the privileged site for the book and this change, along with the transformation of the book from a symbolic to an instrumental object, provoked intense reactions. bernard of clairvaux (1090-1153) criticizes the use of books in cities, as a sort of profanation of the authentic spirit of reading which for him is not the intellectual inquiry but the contemplation of nature and the meditation of the sacred word. for this reason bernard contrasted the cities with the forests: experto crede: aliquid amplius invenies in silvis, quam in libris” (“trust in one experienced: you will learn more from the forests than from the books”) (bernard of clairvaux 241-242; alessio 104). this reaction to the reduction of books to commodities and instruments of a imaginary reality detached from natural and spiritual places – petrarca himself would be another example of such a stance – is not limited to the middle ages, but accompanies the history of reading up to our digital time.3 intensive forms of reading were cultivated in natural settings also in the eighteenth century by intellectuals looking for retreat from society. one can see here the contradictory role played by reading and the book in the age of printing. on the one hand, it became a massive support for social formation and public opinion; on the other, it offered an attractive means for the individual to escape the flattening, at times unreasonable demands of society (wittman 311). the eighteenth-century italian philosopher giambattista vico (1668-1744) still remembers the contemplative importance of the natural surrounding for reading. among other things he traces an original fantastic etymology of reading back to nature, revising the etymology cicero gives for legere and relegere (to collect words, to read again and carefully) as a quality proper to religious people: “those who carefully reviewed and so to speak retraced all the lore of ritual were called religious, from relegere (to retrace or re-read)” (cicero ii xxviii). from a different perspective, vico points to lex as the sylvan rustic origins of lego, a word that had its beginning, he says, in the forests. lex first meant ‘collection of acorns’, from which was derived ilex (‘oak’), for the oak produces the acorns by which swine are drawn together. lex, he continues, was next a collection of vegetables, from which the latter were called legumina . later on, still before the invention of writing, lex pointed to a collection of citizens or the public parliament. finally, vico concludes, only at the end of the process, did lex come to mean collecting letters and legere, ‘reading’ (new science par. 240). vico explains the beneficial relationship of readers to the natural environment in the passage in his autobiography in which he thanks the forests and the nature he was exposed to during the years 1686-1695, spent away from naples in vatolla, a small village in the cilento, as instructor of the family rocca: “he felt most grateful for those woods in which, guided by his good genius, he had followed the main course of his studies untroubled by sectarian prejudice; for in the city taste in letters changed every two 3 petrarch is one of the poets most aware of the living agency of the natural environment in the human life and poetry. two of his letters are exemplar in this respect. the first one was addressed in 1352 to francesco of the church of holy apostles, concerning his rustic and solitary life. see familiares xiii , 8. the second letter, written in 1347 to giovanni colonna, recounts the failure of the multiple attempts to protect petrarch’s garden from the “nymphs”, namely the winter storms and flood waters. see epistola metrica iii 4. humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 8 or three years like styles in dress” (autobiography 133). beyond the rhetorical intention, which, as has been pointed out by many scholars, aims to create the myth of himself as a solitary thinker, we must recognize here an explicit appreciation of the value of the philosophical meditation in contact with the natural environment. this was a significant moment of vico’s life, as he himself emphasizes, defining vatolla a beautiful and solitary site where he was restored to health and had all the leisure to study and lay the foundation of the new science. vico's reasoning is very similar to that of henri david thoreau who more than a century after will live for two years in the forests on the shores of walden pond to rediscover the essentials reasons of life and culture. one could argue that life in the woods for vico and thoreau was not really an immersion in nature, but rather an opportunity to read the classics of different cultures. in this perspective, vico represents an interesting case study of “rational reading” in eighteenth century that anticipates how a writer and philosopher would read literature in this century. in this rural setting, vico rediscovered virgil, latin poetry, the classics of italian literature including its three crowning achievements, dante, petrarca and boccaccio, and, above all, platonic philosophy. vico was reading the texts from these writers three times, following this plan, the first time to grasp each composition as a whole, the second to note the transition and the sequence of things, the third in greater detail to collect the fine turn of thought and expression, which he marked in the book themselves instead of copying them into a commonplace or phrase book. (autobiography 120) vico was convinced that this practice of reading would lead him to make good use of the classics “as his needs recalled them to mind in their context” which for him “is the sole measure of effective thought and expression” (ib.). as one can see, for certain aspects vico’s approach to reading is still related to the scholastic method of cognitive reading including three levels of analysis, littera, sensus, and sententia. the reading program of thoreau was also very wide and included the latin and greek classics, dante, shakespeare, the bible and the sacred writings of other cultures, such as the vedas. one may note that in reality both vico and thoreau returned more than once to their respective cities during the alleged isolation in the woods, and that both possessed a considerable library. all this is true, but this does not detract from the value and veracity of the claim common to both that not only the reading of the classics, but also the partial exposure to “natural simplicity” of the forest pushed, on the one hand, vico to condemn the cartesianism developed in naples and, on the other, thoreau to condemn the superficiality of the culture of concord resulting from the lack of good books that would nurture the basic needs of spiritual life. ultimately, staying in vatolla for vico and in walden for thoreau represented a limited episode in their respective lives, but at the same time the interval was significant in the formation of their thought. ralph waldo emerson in his essay circles epitomizes the important idea behind vico’s and thoreau’s practice of reading: humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 9 literature is a point outside of our hodiernal circle through which a new one may be described. the use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it. we fill ourselves with ancient learning, install ourselves the best we can in greek, in punic, in roman houses, only that we may wiselier see french, english and american houses and modes of living. in like manner we see literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion. the field cannot be well seen from within the field. the astronomer must have his diameter of the earth’s orbit as a base to find the parallax of any star. 3. lector in rete the third revolution in reading since the middle ages may be seen both as a continuation and evolution of techniques of reading already available in medieval and early modernity; and as an introduction of completely new ways of digital reading. we have already seen a couple of examples illustrating the first point: the book wheel as an anticipation of hypertext and multiple platforms of reading made available by digital technology in our times. the hypertextual dimension was also part of the commonplace books that not by chance are rehabilitated today in the digital environment. for instance, hoem and schwebs argue in a recent article in favor of a “digital commonplacing” using online services that allow annotating, tagging, and categorizing content. extracting and remixing information in digital environments, as it happened in analogue commonplacing – they conclude– makes possible to re-contextualize existing material in original and often unforeseen ways.4 moreover, early modern examples of hypertexts include the polyglot bibles and dictionaries. the complutensian polyglot bible is the first printed polyglot copy of the entire bible, initiated by cardinal francisco jiménez de cisneros (1436– 1517) and published by complutense university of madrid. each page consists of three parallel columns of text: hebrew on the left column, the latin vulgate in the middle, and the greek septuagint on the left column. on each page of the pentateuch, the aramaic text and its own latin translation are added at the bottom (fig. 6). the italian lexicographer ambrogio calepino (1440–1510), commonly known by the latin form of his name, calepinus, published in 1590 in basle what may be considered a hypertext dictionary, a latin dictionary which contains eleven languages: "ambrosii calepini dictionarium undecim linguarum: respondent autem latinis vocabulis hebraica, græca, gallica, italica, germanica, belgica, hispanica, polonica, ungarica, anglica" (catholic encyclopedia 1913). in this context it is worthwhile to mention that early incunabula already conceived the use of certain multimedia elements, as shown by the first printed edition of petrarca’s rerum vulgarium fragmenta (canzoniere) published in venice in 1470 by vindelin de spira. the copy from the queriniana library in brescia (inc. queriniano g v 15) is a unique and marvelous edition of the rvf, including extensive illustrations that serve as elaborate visual glosses of fundamental natural and psychological motifs in the poems. the marginalia and handwritten glosses are another unique feature of this edition. the written 4 digital commonplacing. first monday, [s.l.], jun. 2015. available at: <http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5451/4647 http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5451/4647 humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 10 glosses and the illustrations are integrated and provide a remarkable and exceptional interpretation of the rvf favoring the interplay between different layers of texts and images (fig. 7). this example of “hypertext” confirms that after the printing revolution the poems maintain a central position within the page while the written and visual commentaries occupy the margins. as in earlier examples, this is significant because, before the printing age, in some medieval manuscripts like the xiv century latin manuscript of aristotle’s de anima (on the soul) the text lost its centrality on the page and the commentary by averroes became more important (fig. 8). in this case the commentary occupied the central position, the text was inscribed in the exterior columns and looked like an illustration (zali 69).5 despite all these similarities, the third revolution in reading is introducing unprecedented changes in the ways we read texts. first of all, the new and most important role that computation plays in research is as an “enabler of access” to an audience potentially far larger than the one retrieving books from libraries. the availability of texts in digital format is not in itself making the difference, though. what is really important is the organization of the texts available in searchable databases, “with well-defined schema describing that organization and well-defined access protocols for searching the data” (foster 18). this new organization and architecture of texts creates a new situation for the reader, one in which the books are not on the shelves and not conducive to topographical memory. the lector in rete, as we may call the new reader protagonist of the third revolution, is first of all seated before a monitor screen; he or she scrolls through a computerized file in a way that apparently resembles the ancient readers of volumen or roll. in reality, the likeness is deceptive, since the now vertical scroll contains all the logical arrangements of text introduced by the codex, including quite often the pagination and different kinds of indexing. at first sight reading on the screen introduces a relationship with the text that combines two forms of reading that were the result of the two different textual logics and writing supports, the manuscript and the printed text. upon deeper scrutiny, one has to realize that the written text becomes an ephemeral entity on the screen: it lasts the time of its representation. it loses its perennial relationship with its supporting materiality. this is why, notwithstanding the qualities inherited from the previous revolutions in reading, it is not possible to speak of a “pagescreen.” the electronic page is the result of a series of various visual configurations and platforms that may include the visualizations of documents in a mosaic of small windows that the reader can now choose. anne zali speaks in this regard of a “texte nomade” (4647). terje hillesund invites us not to confuse the electronic text in general as described above with the e-book in which the text is related to and integrated with a specific device based on electronic paper, such as the “amazon kindle”; she identifies different typologies of reading. whereas deep and continuous immersive reading is possible with books and to a certain degree with e-books, the digital environment provided by web browsers and hypertext favors a multimodal and discontinuous kind of reading.6 moreover, the recent technological changes have radically modified the relationship 5 http://classes.bnf.fr/idrisi/pedago/culture/aristote.htm 6 terje hillesund, “digital reading spaces: how expert readers handle books, the web and electronic paper.” first monday, 15(4), 2010. http://firstmonday.org/article/view/2762/2504 http://firstmonday.org/article/view/2762/2504 humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 11 between reading and writing to the point that the reader may now be considered a coauthor. in fact, whereas from the appearance of the first incunabula the room for reader intervention was limited to the blank spaces in a page, in the new era opened by digital texts the reader may now intervene at any moment in the production of the text not only by annotating, copying, and indexing, but also by recomposing the texts in new ways different from the original (cavallo, chartier 26-28). for these aspects we should note that the electronic transmission of texts somehow resembles the scholastic compilationes that emerged in the twelfth-century universities as an open textual form not based on an authorial voice. the digital revolution radically refashions the entire system of identifying and handling texts that was in place since the print revolution, giving birth to what nowadays we call digital humanities conceived as “a global, trans-historical, and transmedia approach to knowledge and meaning-making” (burdick vii). douglas engelbart has popularized the idea that the cultural change envisioned by the digital humanities is so deep that is producing a revolution “far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing”, to the point that it is now opening the possibility of “augmenting human intellect” through computer technology.7 in this new situation some scholars have started to believe that we are living in a moment “marking a fundamental shift in the perception of the core creative activities of being human, in which the values and knowledge of the humanities are seen as crucial for shaping every domain of culture and society” (jockers 3). the new representation of writing on the screen modifies the material nature of works. the change involves both writing and reading. to write an electronic text dissolves the distinction among the activities of writing, publishing, and distributing operative until now; it introduces the need for new categories in the aesthetic realm, in the definition of authorship, readership, in the bibliographic description, and in the ways libraries are cataloguing the new textualities. finally, to read in front of the computer is very different from reading a volume, a codex, or a book. in digital collections what matters is not the individual object, the book, but the architecture that governs the electronic files and databases and their system of retrieving information based on search engines, keywords, data mining, and modeling. this change in the conceptualization of reading with a focus on understanding entire systems rather than individual components has been already implemented not only in the humanities but also and above all across a variety of scientific disciplines, engineering, and medicine (foster 15). it may be interpreted as the unifying principle of a radical change in perception in our digital age similar to the move from the linear style to the painterly style in baroque art as studied by heinrich wölfflin (1864-1945), the swiss art historian who was instrumental in the development of a methodology for the formal analysis in art history in the early 20th century. the change was not limited to painting but involved literature and all the art forms. the linear style is the consequence of a linear vision and sees in lines and silhouettes, it appears to be still related to an element of 7 see the official site of the douglas engelbart institute: http://www.dougengelbart.org/ and http://www.viralblog.com/trends-innovations/the-inventor-of-the-computer-mouse-is-no-more/ http://www.dougengelbart.org/ humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 12 physical grasping; in the linear style the eye is like a hand that feels along the body and reproduces a sense of touch. by contrast, this analogical element is not present in the painterly vision that sees in masses and is not interested in the edges. the eye is not the only path of vision and “the primary element of the impression is things as patches” to the point that it does not matter if these patches speak as color or only as lights and darks. in other words, “linear vision sharply distinguishes from form to form, while the painterly eye on the other hand aims at the movement which passes over the sum of things” (wölfflin 18-19). the analogy between digital humanities approach and the seventeenth-century change of perception may lead us to consider that the digital revolution, by privileging the attention toward big data over the individual works, militates against our awareness of literature as vehicle of great works that nurtured the human ear and soul for centuries, to favor a new interest into the literary as such, as an element in the patchwork of civilization that loses the specificity it had for centuries of human history. the new scenario opened to the lector in rete by the new forms of digital collections of text and data mining has led some scholars to advance the possibility of “distant reading” as opposed to the traditional close reading. a prominent figure of this approach is franco moretti, the founder of the stanford literary lab, who addresses literary problems using scientific means based on computational modeling, quantitative analysis, and hypothesistesting. matthew jockers, a colleague and collaborator of moretti, calls this new approach to literature “macroanalysis,” and sees it in some general ways akin to economics or, more specifically, to macroeconomics (3). in this perspective, understanding literature no longer implies studying particular texts, but aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data. moretti claims that “close reading can’t uncover the true scope and nature of literature because the sample size used by traditional criticism is too small” (47ff). he proposes the quantitative approach to literature as “a more rational literary history” (graphs, maps, trees 4). moretti’s scientific approach leads him to suggest that distant reading should replace close reading, not simply supplement it. jockers is very clear about the substantial change in the notion of reading that is at the core of these digital humanities research methodologies. in fact, he prefers the term analysis over reading. the former term, associated with the prefix macro, “places the emphasis on the systematic examination of data, on the quantifiable methodology” and “deemphasizes the more interpretive act of reading.” significantly he concludes, “this is no longer reading that we are talking about— even if programmers have come to use the term “read” as a way of naming functions that load a text file into computer memory” (jockers 25). the macroanalysis oriented by digital humanities is noticeably different from the macrooriented traditional literary studies such as ian watt’s impressive study the rise of the novel (1957) that ultimately remains a study of the novel based on an analysis of just a few authors. jockers believes that the authors chosen by watt as convenient touchstones for his history, “cannot be considered representative of the ten to twenty thousand novels that make up the period watt attempts to cover” (25). in jockers’ perspective the quantitative approach would allow computer to help us see more and deeper, to go beyond what we are capable of reading as solitary scholars. the underlying assumption is humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 13 that by exploring an unprecedented scale of literary records, “we will better understand the context in which individual texts exist and thereby better understand those individual texts” (27). similarly, moretti is convinced that studying literary periods and genres by means of a close study of “representative” texts is not an adequate interpretative methodology because it stitches together separate bits of knowledge about individual cases when the final result of the research shouldn’t be a sum of individual cases but “a collective system, that should be grasped as a whole” (graphs, maps, trees 4). on the other hand, jockers sees all the limitations of data mining and reminds that the goal of big data and digital macroanalysis is not to provide irrefutable conclusions about what a text might mean but more modestly “an alternative method for accessing texts and simply another way of harvesting facts from and around texts” (29). in this perspective macroanalysis is a methodology that might complement the seemingly antithetical idea of close reading. the enhancement of human perception aided by information technology is particularly evident in a geographic information system (gis) that makes possible to store, search, and analyze historical data in a geographical context. one good example is the electronic cultural atlas initiative (ecai) is one among many projects created by the pacific language mapping edited by david blundell. the ecai claims that mapping these languages and cultures is important because it allows geographically viewing layers of data through time. this process also permits geo-referenced data to be accessible with the ability to electronically connect, display, share, and analyze materials.8 franco moretti theorizes the use of maps for literary and sociologial studies. he holds that literary maps are a good way to prepare a text for analysis. the text has to be reduced to a few discrete elements extracted from the narrative flow; those elements will then be visualized in a map or a series of maps that eventually will possess qualities that were not visible at the lower level (graphs, maps, trees 53). the discrete element that moretti extracted from mary mitford’s our village – a collection of village stories published in five volumes between 1824 and 1832 – are the walks of the characters in the stories. this element is apparent to all the readers of our village; however, the maps of these walks reveals something that no reader had noticed before, namely the “circular pattern they project on the english countryside”. the map in itself is not an explanation, but it provides a model of the narrative universe that brings some hidden pattern to the surface for the reflection of the reader who in the end, thanks to a complex and comparative mapping of the texts, becomes able to discern broader and deeper layers of meaning, such as how “the various directions in which rural class struggle, the industrial take-off, and the process of state formation ‘have converted’ the shape of nineteenth-century idylls” (64; fig. 9). however, it is not completely clear to what extent distant reading represents an improvement in our way of understanding individual texts. it certainly adds important statistical and visual aids to the reading of multiple texts. on the other hand, the impression one gets from moretti’s graphs and maps is that of a mass of data treated as magnifying glasses to approach an enormous number of literary texts. it recalls wölfflin’s idea of baroque vision as characterized by a movement from the absolute 8 http://ecai.org/austronesiaweb/pacificlanguages.htm humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 14 clearness of the renaissance to a relative clearness that nevertheless reveals new layers of meaning. in the new vision certain “difficulties” are placed in the way of perception, to improve and deepen it: the image becomes complex and “the spectator, for whom the simple has become too transparent, finds an interest in the solution of more complicated problem” (wölfflin 196). for example, in tintoretto’s pietà a shadow falls over christ’s face which, while it deemphasizes the plastic values, strengthens the viewer’s impression of suffering by highlighting a part of the forehead and a part of the lower face (fig. 10). for the baroque, the old display of forms striving to mold every shape into an even clearness became unnatural, unworthy to repeat. hence the importance of marginal details and ornaments that acquired a new structural value. one can see that something like that is happening in the opposition of distant reading to close reading. the paradox of distant reading is similar to the paradox of baroque vision: in the end its shows the clearness of the unclear. as the seventeenth century found beauty in form being swallowed by darkness, so does the distant reading find intellectual inspiration in massive data that obscure the aesthetic value of literary works to reveal new and more complex layers of meaning in texts that supposedly have lost their appeal to traditional and linear forms of reading. this new attitude of the lector in rete is well represented by irnerio, one of the minor characters in italo calvino’s if on a winter night a traveler. his position on reading is the following: “me? i don't read books!" irnerio says. "what do you read, then?" "nothing. i've become so accustomed to not reading that i don't even read what appears before my eyes. it's not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. i may have had to make some effort myself, at first, to learn not to read, but now it comes quite naturally to me. the secret is not refusing to look at the written words. on the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear." (84) there is a paradox here. the way in which irnerio and more in general the lector in rete do not read books is actually another form of reading based on viewing. irnerio lives in a world that is completely written and made of images and audiovisual media; in this world books and texts are not important for their solid and concrete physical presence, they become an ephemeral reality that disappears in the moment in which we look at them. 4. reading and viewing in what we consider the most culturally advanced parts of the world, the united states and europe, we witness on the one hand the twilight of the canon of western written culture, and on the other hand phenomena of deculturation, the decline of the so-called “strong readers” reading many books per year. the new situation is characterized also by humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 15 the emergence of a new mode of mass reading that appears to be in many ways anarchical, egotistical, and egocentric (petrucci, reading to read 358-360). the publishing industries’ creation of a mass book market is obliterating every rational criterion of book selection. exemplary in this regard is the case of what happened in eastern europe after 1989. in east germany, for example, the mass of strong readers that before that date was used to read the classics and marxist authors are now devouring “whatever the west germany book market offers in the way of trivialliteratur, hobby books, mysteries, science fiction, travel books, etc”. the result have been disastrous, famous publishing houses are closing, the writers association has dissolved, and the first book dump has been created in the environs of leipzig (357). the new condition was first instigated by the consumerist orientation of the publishing industries and somehow later reinforced by the emergence of the instantly available, electronic book. it is illustrated among other things by the end of the traditional order of reading. the new reader is more and more often in front of the screen of a mobile device, avoiding what once were considered good and ordered practices, in favor of free and relaxed modes of reading (363). these deep changes have been taking place for decades. somehow they precede the digital revolution and essentially depend on the emergence of not alphabetic ways of seeing and reading based on the iconic, multisensory, convivial and entertaining culture introduced by television. the emergence of this “visual culture” started first with cinema as theorized by béla balázs in his visible man, or the culture of film (1924), where he claims that the discovery of printing and written culture in general have gradually rendered the human face and body illegible, introducing a dematerialized, abstract and over intellectualized culture. in this way, he writes, “the visible spirit was transformed into a legible spirit, and a visual culture was changed into a conceptual one”; for balázs the erasure of the visible spirit and the alienation of the human body that started with the confusions of tongues in the tower of babel was about to be overcome by the art of film, the “first international language” based on human gestures (9-10). this new vision is just the opposite of what for centuries has been the alphabetic vision, performed in sequential reading through the decoding of the written signs bearing a phonic value. starting in the 1940s, the analogical images purveyed by television have played an even bigger part than cinema in promoting this new orientation towards the word. furthermore, since the 1990s cyber culture has disseminated the digital image as a further disembodiment and virtualization of reality. as a result, audio-visual media are increasingly replacing books and reading as vehicles of mass information and education. we may again see a historical anticipation of this process in baroque culture that introduced a new way of thinking through images and attributed a moral and didactic value to them, as cesare ripa, for example, did in his iconologia (1593). in audio-visual media, reading is not important; what really matters are listening and viewing. a reader and a viewer have different attitudes towards learning and approaching the world. viewing in the new media is for the most part outward-looking and requires less effort than reading as it promises an immediate, intuitive access to our object of attention and inquiry; this access is based on images and the visual areas of our brain that for our ancestors were responsible for object recognition. humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 16 as a consequence, in our time knowledge is increasingly pursued through listening and viewing; in other words, through non-alphabetic and simultaneous forms of intelligence. the authority of the “reality” created by television, as the word tele itself indicates, is the result of a distant vision in which multiple places and distances converge. as giovanni sartori writes, it is the cognitive authority of the image that overwhelms our sensory experience of the world since the eyes believe in what they see: we naturally believe that “what one sees is real and therefore true” (13). significantly, all the abstract and intellectual filters made possible by the alphabetic vision and reading words are reduced if not neglected when one “reads” images. as a result, in our visual culture we tend to believe that what is not visible is not real or true. these profound changes are reconfiguring our perceptions and mental structure; some scholars like sartori speak of the end of homo sapiens with his analytical and sequential approach to reality, in favor of the emergence of the homo videns more and more unable to respond to the stimuli of the written words and surrendering to an unthoughtful, simultaneous, and multisensory apprehension of the world. cyberspace and the internet have created the possibility of reuniting in one single dimension all the images that once were tied to distinct and independent media, from artworks to cinema and television. the power of images in our culture has now been further magnified by the ubiquity of computer screens and the various possibilities of augmented reality by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or gps data. the digital image, conceived more and more not in terms of representation of reality but as simulation obtained through an interactive visualization, has become more independent from possible real referents. the images invading our lives may be preserved in digital archives and are easy to access without having to move away from our desktop or the laptop. moreover, they can be simply edited and manipulated by the viewer through ad hoc software. todd gitlin speaks of the overwhelming saturation of stimuli produced by the torrent of images and sounds created by the unlimited use of media. it is not by chance that these changes coincide with the worldwide persistence of high percentages of non-literacy. we are now witnessing in some quarters the phenomenon of a return to illiteracy due to the reduction or absence of reading and writing.9 certainly, the spread of literacy today meets strong impediments that are not only political or sociological: at the base of the difficulties in the spread of literacy is a new way of looking at the world and a new order of the senses. in this situation, some critics like veronica neri lament the low quality of the images provided by the internet and, more generally, the need for an ethical and 9 according to the unesco institute for statistics today 781 million adults worldwide still cannot read or write – two-thirds of them (496 million) are women. (http://www.uis.unesco.org/literacy/pages/literacy-data-release-2014.aspx). developed nations are also facing a growing illiteracy problem. as for the usa, the 2004 report of the national endowment for the arts to read or not to read shows “a general decline in reading among teenage and adult americans. most alarming, both reading ability and the habit of regular reading have greatly declined among college graduates. these negative trends have more than literary importance” (dana gioia 3). the report connects the declines with evident social, economic, cultural, and civic implications. http://www.uis.unesco.org/literacy/pages/literacy-data-release-2014.aspx humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 17 responsible approach to the images in the web lest we be swallowed up by them (neri 82, 113). we are coming to realize how the hypericonic culture in which we live and the attendant reduction of authentic space of reading are producing a cognitive shift that is changing the consistency of society. as caleb crain writes, if one person decides to watch "the sopranos" rather than to read leonardo sciascia's novella "to each his own," the culture goes on largely as before –both viewer and reader are entertaining themselves while learning something about the mafia in the bargain. but if, over time, many people choose television over books, then a nation's conversation with itself is likely to change. (134) crain points to the importance of television in triggering the cognitive shift we are witnessing; more recently other writers and scholars, like nicholas carr, have not shied away from arguing that paying more attention to the internet is responsible for the big shift, which they tend to see only in negative terms. for some sociologists authentic reading is today returning to its original restricted social base, a “self-perpetuating minority”, and it is not clear at this point whether the reading minority will have in the future “the power and prestige associated with an increasingly rare form of cultural capital or will be viewed as the eccentric practitioners of an increasingly arcane hobby" (griswold, mcdonnel and wright 138). in his article “is google making us stupid?” and more extensively in his book the shallows: what the internet is doing to our brains, carr argues that computer searching, multitasking, social networking and videogaming are making us more superficial. in this perspective, naomi s. baron holds that the internet is promoting a new a notion of reading that structurally privileges “locating information over deciphering and analyzing more-complex text” (“redefining reading 200). in her recent book baron admits the advantages of ereading (search the text, promotion of extensive reading, democratization of the access to the written word) but emphasizes the drawbacks: in her view ereading and digital reading in general are more apt for short pieces or for light content, and not appropriate for longer more serious works that require rereading and analyzing; moreover, she argues that reading onscreen modifies the nature of reading by transforming it from and individual encounter with a text and an author into a social experience as it happens for example in online reading groups like goodreads or the reading group center created by facebook (words onscreen xii-xv; 208 ff.). on the other hand, marian wolf suggests the opportunity and necessity to preserve the best of both worlds, the print and digital literacies. she argues that is possible and essential to encourage deep reading online; the internet may provide us with new ways of teaching and encouraging students and readers in general to be purposeful, critical, and analytical about the texts they encounter. in other words, hypertexts may not be only a source of distraction, as one-sided critics of digital reading claim. hypertexts may also provide important tasks and tools to facilitate successful reading online and the development of a genuine digital literacy oriented by critical thinking. wolf presents as http://www.goodreads.com/ https://www.facebook.com/readinggroupcenter humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 18 an example the cast universal design learning edition for young readers of edgar allan poe's "the tell-tale heart", that includes tutoring on how to use a specific reading strategy (such as visualizing, summarizing, predicting, or questioning) to better understand a passage. nonetheless, she argues that the pursuit of deep reading through digital media should not lead to neglect “the formation of the deep-reading processes in the medium of human's first literacy.” she recalls the fascinating precedents in the history of writing: “the sumerian writing system, in use 3,000 years ago, was preserved alongside the akkadian system for many centuries. along the way, akkadian writing gradually incorporated, and in so doing preserved, much of what was most valuable about the sumerian system” (wolf, the importance of deep reading). without negating the importance of both print and digital literacy, katherine hayles insists on the shift in cognitive styles as a consequence of the increased presence of networked and programmable media in our lives. she articulates the shift as a contrast between deep attention and what she calls “hyper attention”: deep attention, the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities, is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods (say, a novel by dickens), ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times. hyper attention is characterized by switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom. (187) the cognitive shift toward hyper attention characterizes above all the younger generation of the digital natives, who show worrying tendencies, particularly in the case of video gamers. the hyper attention devoted to the overwhelming stimuli provided by different media produces what in an older terminology was known as attention deficit disorder (add); significantly, this term has now been replaced by the newer diagnostic terminology of “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder” (adhd). hayles argues that children growing up in media-rich environments literally have brains wired differently as the plasticity of human brain and the brain's synaptic connections are coevolving with an environment in which media consumption is a dominant factor. however, she continues, media stimulation, if structured appropriately, may contribute to a positive synergistic combination of hyper and deep attention that may be applied in higher education (192193). in this perspective, for hayles it is possible to draw positive pedagogical implications from the cognitive skills involved in video-gaming as for gamers what really counts is not simply the fun of playing but the opportunities offered by the games for achievement, freedom, and, in some instances, connections to other players. in other words, she concludes, “stimulation works best when it is associated with feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness” (195). the ideal situation for this possible synergy is the interactive electronic classroom that provides a wireless laptop for each student and many screens of different format on the wall to provide the opportunity to practice new pedagogical models based on active learning and interactions among students and the teacher. in these classrooms moments http://udleditions.cast.org/intro,telltale_heart.html https://www.mbaea.org/documents/resources/educational_leadership_article_the__d87fe2bc4e7ad.pdf humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 19 of deep attention and reading alternate with sequences of hyper attention that favor multitasking and the use of the so called google jokeys: participants in a presentation or class who surfs the internet for resources mentioned by the presenter. these are then displayed simultaneously with the presentation, helping to clarify the main topic being presented. hayles argues that the capacity for deep attention may and should be enhanced by the use of hyper attention. in this regards she suggests that to encourage digital natives to engage with more traditional objects of study, the teacher may start by using popular web sites that trade on hyper attention and activity. for instance, she studied with her students the strategies of self-presentation used in the extremely popular facebook as an introduction to the “sly and subversive” self-presentations in the education of henry adams (196). to conclude, while the lector in rete appears to be well suited above all for hyper attention, immediate information processing, multi-tasking, and media-driven cognitive approaches, he or she needs to find ways for preserving the irreplaceable value of deep reading still characterized by more time-consuming cognitive processes that are vital for a thoughtful and reflective life. nevertheless, a large portion of scientific research is nowadays directed to push back the brain’s speed barrier, and read with greater speed and efficiency. the team at the laboratory for visual learning – a collaboration of scientists from university of massachussets boston, mit, and harvard, that includes marc pomplun, chen chen, and matthew h. schneps – represents a significant example of this direction. 5. this issue of humanist studies & the digital age the present issue of humanist studies & the digital age contributes to the debate on varieties of reading and attention. on the one hand it confirms the features of reading in our time as described in the historical and theoretical overview delineated above; on the other hand, it introduces new hopes for the possible positive effects of digital innovation in the humanities by documenting inventive academic projects in which the typical hyper attention required by the digital environment is combined with cognitive strategies oriented toward deep reading. the ideal reader these projects have in mind is surely a hyper reader who has to come to terms with multiple layers of meaning in the text, as prompted by the hyperand intertextual setting in which the reading takes place. in his brief videoconference, “change of paradigm: from individual to communitybased scholarship,” massimo riva clarifies that the digital revolution involves not only the transformation of the procedures of scholarly research and learning but also and more importantly the transformation of its goals. the scholarly work is being increasingly made over into a collective, collaborative, large-scale enterprise characterized by the move from discursive to graphic-algorithmic forms of data presentation and interpretation. he holds that as humanists engaged with a potentially radical transformation of the community we belong to, our most daunting task is how to transpose established scholarly practices onto the new platform, envisioning new goals and outputs for our traditional tasks. riva is the editor in chief and coordinator of the pico project, an electronic edition and commentary online (in latin, english and italian) of giovanni pico della http://labvislearn.org/ http://www.cs.umb.edu/~marc/ http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/ecsp/people/chen-chen http://www.scientificamerican.com/author/matthew-h-schneps http://journals.library.oregonstate.edu/hsda http://www.brown.edu/pico humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 20 mirandola’s oratio de hominis dignitate and conclusiones nongenta. in his blog experiments in scholarsourcing, he discusses the reading procedures particularly suited for the pico project. dino buzzetti’s intervention on the blog suggests the application of “topic modeling” techniques as a way of detecting sources of the conclusiones cm in the available digitized corpora of some medieval authors (albertus magnus, thomas aquinas and possibly john duns scotus). this procedure, usually associated with distant reading can be of help in identifying possible sources of a given text. on the other hand, the application of topic modeling as envisioned by buzzetti may be brought to bear also on the practice of linked open data annotation, a procedure more commonly associated with close reading. ernesto priani’s and ana maría guzman olmos’ article “from fragment to hypertext: adding layers of reading” published in this issue of humanist studies & the digital age, further illustrates that the hypertextual representation of the pico della mirandola’s texts allows visualizing different temporal layers of reading. the term “layers of reading” is a metaphor to explain how, historically, each successive reading of a text creates a new layer, an independent “stratum of meaning,” superimposed on the previous one. the authors of the article believe that digital editions and the digital reading have the potential to create a philosophical methodology, based on the awareness of the historical construction of each layer of reading. two articles discuss the issue of intertextuality, close and distant reading in digital contexts, and the advantages of a hypertexual approach to reading. “digital readers of allusive texts: ovidian intertextuality in the commedia and the digital concordance on intertextual dante” by julie van peteghem introduces the notion of a digital concordance as a reading and research tool to explore intertextual passages online, and illustrates how a digital concordance of highly allusive texts can change how we read and research such texts. van peteghem developed a project on digital dante in collaboration with the center for digital research and scholarship at columbia university, which in the first phase highlights the ovidian intertextuality in dante’s divina commedia. since the intertextual passages in the commedia require a reading not restricted to the obviously corresponding verses, but attentive to the broader textual contexts, van peteghem shows how the digital concordance on intertextual dante greatly facilitates such a contextualized and deep reading. the visualization of the corresponding passages (side by side, highlighted within context) and the search options (by category of text reuse or by canto/book/poem) further the study of (ovidian) intertextuality in the commedia, as illustrated in the article with examples from the site. “from quill to mouse: digitizing the ‘woman of letters’ 1861-1922, by cristina gragnani and ombretta frau describes a project in italian digital women’s studies, invisiblewomen.org,10 which is currently being developed as a collaboration between mount holyoke college and temple university. this project provides an interpretive, thematic website on the material culture of italian female intellectuals between 1861 and 1922. gragnani and frau envision in-visiblewomen.org as a tool that allows the investigation of women’s agency in promoting social change and the interconnections between women writers’ material culture, their private space, their access to the public sphere, and the impact of the new media revolution on women’s social status. the two 10 at time of publication, the website's url was not yet available. https://virtualhumanitieslab.wordpress.com/ file:///c:/users/jstaiger/downloads/digitaldante.columbia.edu humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 21 authors hold that the web site will provide a multi-layered, interpretive platform stemming from the expert contribution of scholars in the field. this project has a remarkable visual component as well: the interface is based on a commissioned oil painting representing a late nineteenth century woman writer’s virtual study. each object in this ideal study (pen, ink bottle, letters, magazines etc.) will be clickable and will lead to an encyclopedia-type entry. through the painting, users will be able to access two searchable databases organized hierarchically and interconnected through tagging: a themes database, and an authors database. the last two articles are related to the use of the hypertext oregon petrarch open book (opob) as a reading and research tool for a seminar taught at the university of oregon in winter 2014. "re-reading petrarca in the digital era" by massimo lollini and pierpaolo spagnolo, presents the use of digital encoding as a device for close reading of individual poems as well as a foundation for a distant reading of petrarca's masterpiece. the encoding of petrarca’s masterpiece performed in the seminar was based on keywords meant to identify a network of different themes (poet, laura, metaphysics nature metamorphoses and urban culture) in the rerum vulgarium fragmenta. these themes were considered as interrelated and interdependent. the poet himself becomes the sphere in which all the topics combine in their specific connotations. however, this sphere is related to, dependent on and intersected by the other four spheres. the encoding measured the different manifestations, levels, and meanings of the intersecting relationships. the study of the visual interpretation of the rvf in the inc. queriniano g v 15 paralleled the close reading and encoding activity, and helped students to develop a visual rendering of their themes and a pointed and original and creative interpretation of petrarca’s masterpiece. finally, "e-philology and twitterature" by massimo lollini and rebecca rosenberg presents an original use of twitter to interpret and rewrite the poems of francesco petrarca's rvf implemented within the opob. this activity was partially inspired by the idea of twitterature developed by alexander aciman and emmett rensin. like them, the authors of the article believe that our digital era should develop new and more functional ways of addressing literary texts, but at the same time they are convinced that what aciman and rensin call the "burdensome duty of hours spent reading" cannot be eliminated. on the contrary, the new ways of reading in the digital era as they envisage them are the result and consequence of broader and deeper reading activities. the opob conceived the project of writing 366 tweets, out of the 366 poems that make up the last version of petrarca’s rvf, as the result of different philological activities, from reading the texts in the original language to consulting manuscripts, translations and intersemiotic renderings of the texts. the reading activities that brought to the writing of the 366 tweets are reminiscent of the medieval scholastic method as they were not exclusively aimed at a simple comprehension of the literal meaning (littera) of the poems. this was just the first stage performed through the reading of the original text and the writing of the paraphrase. the writing of the summary conceived as the general meaning (sensus) of the poem represented the second stage. finally, the individuation of the keywords and the writing of the tweet allowed reaching the full profundity of the poem in a sort of http://petrarch.uoregon.edu/ humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 22 proposition (sententia). the reader will find the actual 366 tweets from the rvf both in italian and english in the appendix to the article. works cited alessio, franco. “conservazone e modelli del sapere nel medioevo.” rossi, pietro. la memoria del sapere : forme di conservazione e strutture organizzative dall'antichità a oggi. bari: laterza, 1988. 99-133. print. bible. polyglot. alcalà de henares: arnao guillén de brocar, 1514-1517. print. balázs, béla, erica carter, and béla balázs. béla balázs: early film theory : visible man and the spirit of film. new york: berghahn books, 2010. print. baron, naomi s. words onscreen: the fate of reading in a digital world. new york, ny: oxford university press, 2015. print. ---. “redefining reading: the impact of digital communication media.” pmla – modern language association, 1(128), 193–200. print. bernard of clairvaux. epistola 106. patrologia latina vol. 182. 241-242. web source available at http://patristica.net/latina/#t182 date accessed: 03 aug. 2015. buonaventure, saint. “commentarium in i librum sententiarum.” opera omnia. ad claras aquas, i, 1882. print. burdick, anne, et al. digital humanities. cambridge, mass: mit press, 2012. internet resource. print. calvino, italo, and william weaver. if on a winter's night a traveller. london: vintage, 1998. print. carr, nicholas. the shallows: what the internet is doing to our brains. new york, ny: w.w. norton & company, 2010. print. catholic encyclopedia (1913)/ambrogio calepino. wikisource . wikisource , 20 apr. 2013. web. 13 aug. 2015 cavallo, guglielmo, chartier, roger, and cochrane, lydia g. a history of reading in the west. amherst: u of massachusetts, 1999. print. ---. cavallo, guglielmo, chartier, roger. “introduction.” cavallo, guglielmo., chart ier, roger, and cochrane, lydia g. a history of reading in the west. 1-36. print. http://patristica.net/latina/#t182 humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 23 cicero, marcus t, and h rackham. de natura deorum: academica. london: w. heinemann, ltd, 1933. print. crain, caleb. "twilight of the books." the new yorker 24 dec. 2007: 134. academic onefile. web. 23 march. 2015. print. dane, joseph a. the myth of print culture: essays on evidence, textuality, and bibliographical method. toronto: university of toronto press, 2003. print.  dickinson, emily, and thomas h. johnson. the complete poems of emily dickinson. boston : little, brown and company, 1960. print. eisenstein, elizabeth l. the printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural transformations in early modern europe. cambridge [england]: cambridge university press, 1979. print. emerson, ralph waldo. essays and english traits. vol. v. the harvard classics. new york: p.f. collier & son, 1909–14; web source available at bartleby.com, 2001. www.bartleby.com/5/ date accessed: 30 july, 2015. gitlin, todd. media unlimited: how the torrent of images and sounds overwhelms our lives. new york: metropolitan books, 2001. print. gioia, dana. “preface.” to read or not to read: a question of national consequence: executive summary. washington, dc: national endowment for the arts, 2007. web source. date accessed: 30 august, 2015. griswold, wendy, terry mcdonnell, and nathan wright. “readers and reading in the twentyfirst century.” annual review of sociology 31 (2005): 127–41. print. hayles, n k. "hyper and deep attention: the generational divide in cognitive modes." profession. 2007.1 (2007): 187-199. print. hillesund, terje. “digital reading spaces: how expert readers handle books, the web and electronic paper.” first monday, 15(4), 2010. web source available at http://firstmonday.org/article/view/2762/2504 (ver. 04.04.2015). date accessed: 3 july, 2015. hadot, pierre. qu'est-ce que la philosophie antique? paris: gallimard, 1995. print. hoem, jon; schwebs, ture. “digital commonplacing.” first monday, [s.l.], jun. 2015. issn 13960466. web source available at: <http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5451/4647>. date accessed: 03 aug. 2015. doi:10.5210/fm.v20i7.5451. http://www.bartleby.com/5/ http://firstmonday.org/article/view/2762/2504 http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5451/4647 humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 24 hugo de sancto victore [hugh of saint victor]. didascalicon de studio legendi. intratext digital library, 2007. web source available at <http://www.intratext.com/ixt/lat0506/>. date accessed: 10 june 2015. illich, ivan. in the vineyard of the text. chicago and london: chicago up, 1993. print. jockers, matthew l, and jockers, matthew lee. topics in the digital humanities : macroanalysis : digital methods and literary history. urbana, il, usa: u of illinois, 2013. topics in the digital humanities. web source. date accessed: 10 august 2015. moretti, franco. distant reading. 2013. london: verso; 2013. print. ---. graphs, maps, trees: abstract models for a literary history. london and new york: verso, 2005. print. neri, veronica. l'immagine nel web: etica e ontologia. roma: carocci, 2013. print. petrarca, francesco. familiares xiii , 8. francesco petrarca, and aldo s. bernardo. letters on familiar matters = rerum familiarium libri. new york: italica press, 2005. 204-206. print. ---. epistola metrica iii, 4. francesco petrarca, and ferdinando neri. rime, trionfi, e poesie latine. milano: r. ricciardi, 1951. 772-776. print. petrucci, armando and charles m. radding. writers and readers in medieval italy, trans. new haven: yale up: 1995. print. petrucci, armando. “reading to read: a future for reading.” cavallo, guglielmo, chartier, roger, and cochrane, lydia g. a history of reading in the west. 345-367. print. ramelli, agostino. diverse et artificiose machine. parigi : in casa del'autore, co[n] priuilegio del re, 1588. beinecke rare book and manuscript library, yale university. print. ripa, cesare, and george richardson. iconology. new york: garland pub, 1979. print. sartori, giovanni. homo videns: televisione e post-pensiero. roma: laterza, 1997. print. matthew h. schneps. “using technology to break the speed barrier of reading.” scientific american. scientific american, a division of nature america, inc. sep 8, 2015. web source available at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/using-technology-tobreak-the-speed-barrier-of-reading/?wt.mc_id=sa_wr_20150909.. date accessed: 09/15/2015. humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 25 watt, ian. the rise of the novel. harmondsworth: penguin, 1957. print. wittmann, reinhard. “was there a reading revolution at the end of he eighteenth century?” cavallo, guglielmo, chartier, roger, and cochrane, lydia g. a history of reading in the west. 285-312. print. wölfflin, heinrich. principles of art history. the problem of the development of style in later art. new york: dover publications, 1950. print. wolf, maryanne, and catherine j. stoodley. proust and the squid: the story and science of the reading brain. new york, ny: harpercollins, 2007. print. ---. wolf, m., & barzillai, m. (2009). “the importance of deep reading.” educational leadership, 66(6), 32–37. web. accessed 09-11-2015. humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 26 appendix figures quoted in the text figure 1: abbott papyrus, a record written in hieratic script; it describes an inspection of royal tombs in the theban necropolis and is dated to the 16th regnal year of ramesses ix, ca. 1110 bce. multi-license with gfdl and creative commons cc-by-sa-2.5 and older versions (2.0 and 1.0). back to pag. 2 figure 2: vatican virgil vat. lat. 3225 reconstruction: an illustrated odyssey volumen from the 3rd c. bc, late 4th-early 5th c. data fron university of california san diego. back to pag. 2 humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 27 figure 3: three vellum pieces sewn together to make a roll. parchment 1455 x 175 mm from pavia, italy. language: latin. source: bancroft library uc berkeley. back to pag. 2 humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 28 figure 4 agostino ramelli's ruota dei libri source: beinecke rare book & manuscript library (yale university) back to pag.5 humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 29 figure 5: merchant commonplace book. source: beinecke rare book & manuscript library (ms 327), yale university) back to pag. 5 humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 30 figure 6: bible. polyglot. alcalà de henares: arnao guillén de brocar, 1514-1517. source: http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2014/music-continentalbooks-manuscripts-l14402/lot.21.html back to pag.10 http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2014/music-continental-books-manuscripts-l14402/lot.21.html http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2014/music-continental-books-manuscripts-l14402/lot.21.html humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 31 figure 7: francesco petrarca, canzoniere. i trionfi. venezia: vindelino da spira, 1470. source: queriniana library, brescia (inc. queriniano g v 15). university of oregon digital collection. back to pag.10 humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 32 figure 8: aristotle, de anima, lain translation with the commentary by averroes. parchement, paris, beginning of xiv century.e. bnf, manuscrits (latin 17155 fol. 181v-182) source: http://classes.bnf.fr/idrisi/pedago/culture/aristote.htm back to pag.10 http://classes.bnf.fr/idrisi/pedago/culture/aristote.htm humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 33 figure 9: franco moretti, graphs, maps, trees, p.61. originally published in new left review, 26 march-april 2004, 101. back to pag. 14 humanist studies & the digital age lollini 4.1 (2015) 34 figure 10: tintoretto, pietà (1560ca). gallerie dell'accademia, venice, italy. source: http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/t/tintoret/index.html back to pag. 14 http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/t/tintoret/index.html humanist studies & the digital age, 6.1 (2019) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.6.1.5 69 the dialogues bioregional project: landscape ecology in central italy from the sixth century to the present damiano benvegnù abstract: pope gregory i (r. 590-604), commonly known as saint gregory the great, is celebrated for re-organizing both the institutional and liturgical life of the roman catholic church; for instigating the first recorded large-scale mission from rome to england; and for his writings. among these, a distinct importance has been attributed to his “dialogues,” a collection of four books of miracles, signs, wonders, and healings carried out by then little-known holy men, which represent a portion of central italy as a sacred space where the christian god is present in both human and non-human form, while also interacting with the environment by performing landscaping functions. this article outlines the “dialogues bioregional project,” a digital, interdisciplinary interface on italian landscape ecology which would promote dialogues between scientists and humanists as well as provide a modeling tool for environmental and cultural awareness. shaped around the “dialogues” of pope gregory i, this digital humanities project explores continuities and discontinuities between the socio-political and ecological history of a specific section of italian territory, a set of multidisciplinary environmental narratives (from c. 600 ad to the present), and local communities. my aim is to introduce readers to the ecological potentials of gregory’s book and thus prompt scholars interested in the environmental humanities and the integration of biophysical and analytical approaches with humanistic and holistic perspectives to become part of the “dialogues bioregional project” and collaborate in its further development. in his 2000 paper entitled “the landscape narrates” [“il paesaggio racconta;” now collected in turri 2010], italian geographer eugenio turri argues that a landscape is first and foremost a “depository of stories” (161). these stories are told in two ways. on the one hand, there are the superficial events that represent the synchronic interactions between a human community and a specific environment. on the other hand, there are the ecological sedimentations of a territory, the diachronic stratigraphy of those events that, as inevitably as for a chemical process, have precipitated below the surface (161). turri claims that the two sets of stories are strongly intertwined and advocates for a practice which allows for a simultaneous dual-reading: only a strong hermeneutical appreciation for this double set of narratives would in fact allow us to preserve a landscape’s continuity and future. turri’s reflection is prompted by what he calls “the submersion of the pre-existing landscape,” a http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ humanist studies & the digital age benvegnù 6.1 (2019) 70 process that he claims has been happening in italy with the increasing modernization of the country. indeed, in the last 50 years, large portions of italy’s traditionally agro-pastoral landscape have been submerged, flooded not with water but with new economic activities and industrial constructions that have erased those signs which bear witness to the historical interdependence of human communities and specific physical environments (178). against this tendency – which he labels “riempimento” (filling) – turri suggests paying attention to the original motivations behind the organization of a specific landscape, for two main reasons, both connected to what he sees as good eco-cultural planning. first, a better archeological knowledge would help us understand, in our current hybrid landscapes, what is “functional” and what is instead “memorial,” namely the different kinds of relationships local communities have with places, spaces, and monuments that constitute their specific territories. second, this knowledge would increase our awareness of how those landscapes which form the foundation of local identities not only can be reconstructed through the surviving evidence, but also – to be preserved – they “must be sacralized, in cultural sense” [“vanno sacralizzati (in senso culturale);” 184]. in italy, few institutions have understood the socio-cultural relevance of such landscape planning better than the roman catholic church. although “the christian sacralization of space was not as old as christianity itself” (caseau 1999,40), following its transition from minority cult practiced in private homes to imperial religion, the church increasingly worked to transform the numerous pagan spaces scattered throughout the italian territory into properly christian spaces, often sacralizing for the first time or resacralizing as christian locations that have been abandoned or forgotten. for instance, in recent years, archeology has given us early evidence of a slow “destructuring” of a pagan landscape followed by the creation of “a new, christianized panorama,” often adhering closely to the main routes connecting rome to the adjacent provinces (spera 2003, 39). these changes to the landscape, and the archeological/textual artifacts which document them, offer us an opportunity to follow turri’s advice to protect italy’s landscape from further eco-cultural catastrophe and submersion: by exploring the narratives behind italy’s landscape organization, we can achieve a better understanding of the alleged original interaction between humans and a specific environment. although contemporary geographers such as yi-fu tuan acknowledge that the adjective “sacred” can be applied to modern landscapes only by stretching its original meaning, these sacred narratives can nonetheless reactivate those polarized tensions as between the numinous and the quotidian, the supernatural and the scientific, that bond together human and nonhuman actants in a specific territory (tuan, 97-99). this article focuses on a digital project shaped around one of the most intriguing documents of the early church, the dialogues of pope gregory the great. a collection of four books of miracles, signs, wonders, and healings carried out by then little-known holy men in sixth-century italy, the dialogues represented a portion of central italy as a sacred space where the christian god is present in both human and nonhuman form, while also interacting materially with the environment by performing landscaping functions. the stories collected in gregory’s work testify to turri’s concern for the importance of the myths connected to the original organization of a landscape as well as to what iovino and oppermann has called “material narrativity,” namely a shared creativity in which “human and non-human players produce narrative emergences that amplify reality, also affecting our cognitive response to this reality” (8). moreover, they can be read as excellent examples of bioregional literature: in narrating the original interaction between human and nonhuman actants within a series humanist studies & the digital age benvegnù 6.1 (2019) 71 of landscapes that are now often neglected, they helped “people reimagine the places where they live and their relations with those places, as well as reflect the unique bioregional character of specific communities” (lynch, glotfelty & armbruster 2012, 4). the goal of this article is thus twofold: 1) to introduce readers to the ecological potentials of gregory’s book through an analysis of the functions performed by nonhuman agents in shaping the sacred landscapes narrated in the miracle stories; and 2) to present the dialogues bioregional project (hereafter dbp), a digital humanities project that i am developing around the dialogues, meant to create a set of near-continuous ecological narratives of central italy from ca. 600 ad to the present, primarily in the form a deep (or “thick”) map. accordingly, while the first section of this article is meant to display the ecological potential of gregory’s text and its crucial value as a quasi literal pre-text for an exploration of central italy’s landscape ecology, the second and third sections focus instead on outlining theoretical premises, structure, goals, and current state of the dbp. although a 2017 grant awarded by the neukom institute for computational science at dartmouth college allowed me to start working on this digital project, the dbp is still in its very early stages: not public yet, it exists as an embryonic frame only within the private repository of dartmouth digital commons. the dbp’s aims as described in this article are thus subject to change as the project goes public and we begin to gather data and feedback from its various users. deep maps as the dbp aspires to be are in fact voluminous, polyvocal, and open-ended; they are enterprises meant “to provide a conceptual base for examining the nuanced and qualitative aspects of community knowledge and broadening the participatory mapping process” (harris, 323). consequently, it is highly likely that even my initial conception of the dbp – as a platform where scholars interested in the integration of biophysical and analytical approaches to the environment with humanistic and holistic perspectives can collaborate – will be modified by the encounters with both the local communities inhabiting the locations mentioned in gregory’s text and potential non-local users interested in the project. yet, as provisional and aspirational as it might seem, my hope is that introducing the dialogues as a blueprint for the landscape ecology of central italy will indeed prompt interested scholars and communities to join the dbp and collaborate in its further development and objectives. ultimately, i believe that by exploring the diverse ecological narratives that shape our understanding of specific physical environments, we might indeed achieve both a richer, more democratic, and more responsible sense of the fundamental connectivity of “various knowledge orders” and life-forms (springett, 623). as a deep map, the dbp thus has “the potential to be inclusive of ecological as well as social concerns and work toward creating conversations that change the way people perceive, think about and ultimately engage with place” without neglecting the socio-economic and cultural needs of indigenous communities (633). finally, throughout this article i will be using terms and categories such as “space,” “territory,” “environment,” and “landscape:” while in general discourses they might at times indicate similar entities, they nonetheless have different meanings and thus deserve a brief explanation. for “space” and the often-associated term “place,” i follow yi-fu tuan’s 1977 canonical work, according to which while the former is abstract, objective, and geometrical, the latter is instead phenomenological, subjective, and experiential (5). in a sense, the whole dbp is an attempt to reframe what is mere representational space into a set of polysemic, multi-layered places. “territory” has more a political tone, meaning a geographic area under the jurisdiction of a governmental authority or an administrative subdivision of a country. in this article is often used in relations to pope gregory’s humanist studies & the digital age benvegnù 6.1 (2019) 72 administration of the italian land. the term “environment” designates instead the complex of physical, chemical, and biotic factors (such as climate, soil, and living things) that act upon an organism or an ecological community and ultimately determine its form and survival. the dbp is an environmental project in so far as it relates to the natural world, the impact of human activity on its condition, and how human cultures describe this impact both synchronically and diachronically. lastly, as it will be better articulated later, the category of “landscape” is used in this article not as a synonym for “natural scenery” but to address the complex and performative interactions of human and nonhuman agents within a specific portion of the earth’s surface. from the perspective of landscape ecologies, the dbp thus studies and visualize the interplay of socio-cultural and environmental pattern and structure capable of affecting ecological communities across dynamic temporal and spatial scales. 1. gregory’s dialogues pope gregory i, commonly known as saint gregory the great, was the first monk to be elected pope of the catholic church, an office he held from 590 ad to his death fourteen years later. gregory is famous for re-organizing both the institutional and liturgical life of the church; for instigating the first recorded large-scale mission from rome to convert the anglo-saxon people of england to christianity; and for his writings (including sermons, manuals, commentaries, and 850 surviving letters), which were more prolific than those of any of his predecessors as pope. among these writings, a distinct importance has been attributed to the dialogues, a collection of four books of miracles, signs, wonders, and healings carried out by then little-known holy men, primarily monks, of sixth-century italy. as the title of the work conveys, these miracles are told as a series of short narratives framed within a dialogue between gregory himself and a deacon named peter. while the stories are told by the former, it is the latter who triggers the narration with his relentless questioning about those italian “virtuous men” who, to his knowledge, have nonetheless performed “no signs or miracles” (gregory 2016, 5). gregory proceeds to correct his deacon’s opinion and narrates circa 200 of these signs or miracles, often moving from one holy man to another, but sometimes focusing at length on one individual, as in book 2, completely devoted to the life and miracles of st. benedict of nursia. several narratives in the dialogues come (with only minor changes) from a mediterranean “common fund of stories and teaching, upon which eastern and western christian writers alike could draw” (petersen, xxi). yet, a significant amount of them have been probably collected through epistolary exchanges, with gregory urging his numerous correspondents to send him via letter “the miracles of the fathers, which we have heard took place in italy,” as he writes to maximian, bishop of syracuse, in july 593 (gregory 2004, 268-269 [3.50]).1 as carole straw has pointed out, gregory probably began writing the dialogues in the summer of 593 and finished by 594, “but his work is the fruit of decades spent hearing and collecting stories of the holy men” (67). the writings thus exhibit a knowledge of the material territory where they take place which, as i will explain shortly, is functional to their overall objective. traditionally, the dialogues have been read either because they contain the first biography of the founder of western monasticism (benedict, in book 2) or for the theological explanations on afterlife 1 on the issue of gregory’s extradiegetic sources and intradiegetic informants, see petersen 1984 and laghezza 2009, respectively. humanist studies & the digital age benvegnù 6.1 (2019) 73 included in book 4. both historians and theologians have in fact usually ignored the rest of the dialogues, some of them even contesting the attribution of the four books to gregory due to the alleged lack of sophistication of the latin writing and the low social and intellectual status of the main characters.2 yet, textual evidence suggests that the four books were instead very dear to gregory, actually speaking to his concerns on both pastoral and administrative levels as they depict a portion of central italy at a turning point in both italic and european history. having been both defensively and administratively abandoned by weakened roman imperial powers based in ravenna, central italy was increasingly devastated by the frequent incursions of non-italic invaders, most notably the lombards, resulting in panic, chaos, and despair. although scholars have disagreed on the reasons behind gregory’s geographical choices and have even accused him of historical inaccuracy,3 we can surely say that the circa 200 miracles narrated in the dialogues represented a portion of central italy as a sacred space populated by holy men—and not one abandoned by god as distraught contemporaries were inclined to believe. as laghezza has pointed out, the dialogues can instead be considered the expression of a political and pastoral project meant to create a “privileged space – rome and central italy – in which the presence of the divine was persisted and perceived, a shield against the dangers of history” (laghezza 2012, 259). different categorizations of the miracle stories are possible. in her comprehensive volume on gregory, boesch gajano provides a classification of the miracles but also acknowledges the difficulty implicit in any categorizations (236). yet, even when the landscape is not the direct focus of the hagiographic narrative, each story includes elements that offer an ecological map of human and nonhuman dwelling interactions in the sixth century, and binds the landscape—in all its familiarity, generosity, and treachery—with human action and salvation. although the book clearly belongs to a hagiographical genre quite typical in late antiquity, all the stories in the dialogues reveal the christian god’s presence in those human-nonhuman interactions capable of performing landscaping functions.4 the dialogues thereby establish a “sacred geography” (boesch gajano 2012) in which both human communities and the whole biosphere surrounding them are mutually transformed. as laghezza has indicated, rural and urban realities are almost equally present in the dialogues, but gregory does not always offer precise geographical information about the place in which a miracle or a wonder has occurred (laghezza 2012, 251). despite this “terminological imprecision, variety and ostensible disorganization of territorial references” (boesch gajano 2004, 292), circa thirty different towns are mentioned, mostly located in the regions surrounding rome, unsurprisingly the city that is cited the most in the four books. the dialogues also mention urban centers that are both in northern and southern italy, as well as a few places outside the italic peninsula, but it is the territory that goes roughly from ravenna to nola that provides the location for the vast majority of the narratives. moreover, the dialogues show a peculiar ability to observe and narrate environmental realities that, 2 on this topic, see clark 1986; clark 2003; and, for an opposite perspective, boesch gajano 2004. accepting gregory’s authorship, did not necessarily mean sympathy toward the dialogues either: see for example the harsh hostility toward this book expressed by edward gibbon in his notorious the history of the decline and fall of the roman empire (103). 3 for two opposite perspectives on gregory’s geography in the dialogues, see respectively boesch gajano 2004, 164-168; and cremascoli 2001, 259. 4 this is not, of course, a theological argument meant to explain the connection between the divine and the natural either in general or in gregory’s theology; for such a debate with specific reference to the dialogues, see mccready 1989, 206240. humanist studies & the digital age benvegnù 6.1 (2019) 74 although forming only part of a larger eschatological plan, nonetheless reveal the writer’s interest in the material and historical interactions between human communities and the physical world. for instance, grégoire has noted how the sea and the land are the objects of both gregory’s essential curiosity and analytic interpretation: his ability to describe in detail distinct weather conditions speaks to a population engaged in activities that are very much influenced by and connected to what we may now perceive as minimal changes in their environment (75). the dialogues’ miraculous narratives are meant to create a peculiar space, capable of transforming, sacralizing it, a whole territory: an activity that scholars compare to the material transformation of the rural landscape produced by contemporary monks around their monastery (boesch gajano 2004, 295). consequently, the landscape in gregory’s book is often characterized by a movement toward precision and particularity (for example, from the general province to a specific cave or boulder), and, even though it is always functional to a specific holy man’s story, it is never mere background but a constitutive element of the miracle. boesch gajano claims that in the dialogues “space shapes sanctity and it is reshaped by sanctity” (297), thus emphasizing the dynamic, almost circular and performative, nature of the landscape instead of its traditional, static and passive, visuality. in this sense, gregory’s book offers a unique opportunity to consider in a pre-modern context a notion of the landscape as a performative space which emphasizes simultaneous human intervention in and witness to landscape as the basis for ecological sustainability and cultural growth. yet, although all the miracles belong to such sacred geography, nonhuman elements are not explicit features of every story, and in fact, nonhuman elements perform a crucial role in less than half of stories. as we will see better shortly, only in circa seventy of the more or less 200 miracles collected in the dialogues there is either a zoological, botanical, hydrological, or geological feature clearly implicated in the landscape building process. nonetheless, when inserted in the right digital frame, these seventy stories equip us with a foundation for the study of the landscape ecology of central italy, that is to say they bring forth, through their narratives, a set of patterns and structures across dynamic temporal and spatial scales in which not only biotic and abiotic processes and disturbances occur within the environment, but also testify to landscape changes capable of affecting the overall structure of ecological communities.5 2. the dialogues bioregional project the dbp is a digital, cross-disciplinary, and multimedia interface on italian landscape ecology shaped around the dialogues of pope gregory i. it explores continuities and discontinuities between the socio-political and ecological features of a specific portion of italian territory, a set of multidisciplinary environmental narratives (from c. 600 ad to the present), and local communities. the dbp is meant to be collaborative and provide a digital platform for dialogues between scientists and humanists, a modeling tool for environmental and cultural awareness, and an opportunity for experiential learning and sustainable economic development. when fully functional, the dbp would supply for both each and all locations mentioned in the dialogues in which a nonhuman actant plays an important role what geographers call a “deep map” (or “thick map”). a deep map is an attempt to try to comprehend space, place, and time in concert and 5 a quite exhaustive introduction to landscape ecology is gardner, o’neill, and turner, 2001. humanist studies & the digital age benvegnù 6.1 (2019) 75 has been recently defined as “a finely detailed, multimedia depiction of a place and the people, animals, and objects that exist within it” (bodenhamer, corrigan, & harris, 3; 135). a deep map ties together the tangible and the material with the discursive and ideological dimension of a place – matters with meanings – but, unlike conventional maps, it does it privileging “experiential navigation, time-based approaches, participatory mapping, and alternative rhetorics of visualization” (presner & shepard, 207). as todd presner writes about the hypercities project, deep mapping (or, as he calls it, “thick mapping”) thus emphasizes “context and meaning-making through a combination of micro and macro analyses that foster a multiplicity of interpretations rather than simply reporting facts or considering maps as somehow given, objective, or complete” (presner; shepard; & kawano, 19). consequently, a deep map acknowledges how engaged human agents “build spatially framed identities and aspirations out of imagination and memory” (bodenhamer, corrigan, & harris, 3) that often require equally engaged nonhuman involvement and participation, as is the case in the dialogues. the dbp would be a deep map of both the larger portion of central italy mentioned in gregory’s book and each location, revealing the ties that places have with each other as well as outlining the specific more-than-human temporal and spatial network that has characterized and may still characterize each place. in this sense, as with a deep map, the dbp would be simultaneously a platform, a process, and a product, provoking negotiation between insiders and outsiders, experts and contributors, over what is represented and how (21; 227). a project such as the dbp only now becomes possible thanks to advanced spatial technologies and functions that work through a series of layers corresponding to how traditional gis operates. as bodenhamer has pointed out, deep maps and gis maps ultimately offer a visual interactive space in which the relative transparency of layers allows users to contribute to “a virtual world in which uncertainty, ambiguity, and contingency are ever present but all are capable of being braided into a narrative that reveals the ways in which space and time influences and is influenced by social interaction” (22). they thus both permit us to see a community in which “what is known is not only a function of objects but also of subjects and observers, of what is desired and needs to be known,” as well as define place “as sedimented layers of meaning” (22). having as a point of departure one specific miracle story of the dialogues and its correspondent location, the dbp proceeds by adding layers of narrative (historical, literary, spatial, etc.) and scientific data with the aim of creating a nearcontinuous ecological stratigraphy from ca. 600 ad to the present. in so doing, it would generate, for each story and location, a collaborative community in which scholars, researchers, and local populations would interact to both reconstruct and negotiate knowledge. my goal is for the dbp to operate as an ecological narrative generation platform, that is to say, a platform that would provide new ecological insights into the correlation, interaction, and structure of ecological events and narratives in space and time. as delozier, mcintosh, & yuan write about their own american civil war gis platform, narrative generation is performed by connecting events in space and time based on actors (both biotic and abiotic), action or both “to decipher the spatiotemporal relationships among actors and action in making histories” (181). for an example of how the dbp is built to perform, i want to take one of my favorite miracle stories of the dialogues. as gregory narrates in book 3, chapter 11, cerbonius was “a man of holy life” and the bishop of populonium, modern populonia, a tiny frazione (hamlet) of the larger town of piombino in tuscany today, but in the sixth century ad still an important roman city, albeit humanist studies & the digital age benvegnù 6.1 (2019) 76 increasingly devastated by foreign invasions. as the story goes, once cerbonius gave shelter to some christian soldiers and so saved their lives from the goths. totila, the goths’ “impious king,” learned of the bishop’s action and “in great rage and cruelty commanded him to be brought unto a place called merulis (eight miles from populonium), where he remained with his whole army, and in the sight of the people to be cast unto wild bears to be devoured.” in front of a large crowd (perhaps in a natural amphitheater? in the woods?), cerbonius was brought forth, where a ferocious bear was waiting: “out of his den was the beast let loose, who in great fury and haste set upon the bishop: but suddenly, forgetting all cruelty, with bowed neck and humbled head, he began to lick [cerbonius’] feet: to give them all to understand that men carried towards the man of god the hearts of beasts, and the beasts as it were the heart of a man.” as ziolkowski has pointed out, this story can be read as just one example of the several biographical saints’ narratives in which wild bears play a positive ex machina role, somehow rescuing, submitting to, or entering the service of holy personages (ziolkowski 2017, 30). although this religious and theological aspect is certainly crucial for a correct interpretation of the story and its historical repercussions, for the dbp it would be only a point of departure. from the perspective of the environmental humanities, what is interesting is that bears are no longer part of the tuscan landscape, their presence in central italy being almost completely limited to the abruzzo national park, where they are severely endangered. the story of cerbonius as narrated in the dialogues instead implicitly assumes these nonhuman animals still lived in that territory and thus offers us an opportunity to explore the symbolic and material interactions that the local human community and the bears have had throughout the centuries. what in fact happened to the bears? when did they disappear? why? and how has the story of cerbonius influenced the local community? do we still have visible signs of this story in the landscape? and what other further narratives might these possible signs have created and still create? can we use this story as the base for a new understanding of the tuscan landscape that would potentially enhance both ecological care and cultural prosperity? to answer these questions (and others that might arise from further in loco investigations), an interdisciplinary team of scholars, students, and local experts must be assembled, a team capable of tackling the multifaceted complexity implicit in the miracle story. for example, in the case of cerbonius, a student majoring in classics (latin literature), a zoologist, and a historian of europe might collectively analyze the presence and significance of bears as narrated in the dialogues. in this hypothetical scenario, their interaction provides each of them with specific advantages: the student’s research on bears in latin literature can be enriched by the ethological and historical expertise of the two senior scholars; the zoologist’s research on bears in italy profits from the linguistic and historical depth presented by the student and the historian, respectively; the historian’s work benefits from both the etymological and literary perspective provided by the student and the zoological precision offered by his colleague in zoology. lastly, the interdisciplinary research output generated by the academic cooperation interacts with popular and often orally-transmitted knowledge possessed by local communities about human-bear relationships in their own territory. this interaction would provide data otherwise unavailable to the scholars as well as scientific, historical, and environmental awareness to local communities interested also in investing responsibly in that specific landscape. humanist studies & the digital age benvegnù 6.1 (2019) 77 3. current state of the project thanks to a compx faculty grant awarded by the neukom institute for computational science at dartmouth college, i have been able to work with a few colleagues of the dartmouth research computing team and a student of mine to develop the digital frame that will eventually host the dbp.6 we first selected the stories in the dialogues in which nonhuman, environmental features played a crucial landscape function: as i mentioned in the previous section, circa seventy of them were selected and the locations in which the miracle or wonder occurred were annotated. some of the locations were not mentioned by gregory with geographical precision, but we still managed to pinpoint with reasonable certainty the majority of them thanks to external sources, like local history or religious scholarship. interestingly, not all of them are still active centers of social and/or spiritual life. instead, several of the locations mentioned in the dialogues have been abandoned and have therefore lost the once-established connection between the local environment and the human community. however, even when this connection is still present – namely, a human community dwells upon the same territory mentioned by gregory – the original link as narrated in the book is often overlooked, if even acknowledged at all: a few ruins are usually the only signs to remind us of the original organization of that specific landscape. once all the locations were identified, we then marked the stories according to the main characteristic of their nonhuman actants: if in the story there was a nonhuman animal, it would be marked as “zoological”; a plant of any kind would mean “botanical” feature; a body of water, “hydrological;” a stone, boulder, or any type of rock, “geological.” we assigned different icons to these features: a bear, a mediterranean stone pine, a waterfall, and a mountain, respectively. those icons were selected for practical reasons, but they might be changed in the future, if necessary. sometimes the same story may have different markers, such as in the case of the only story in which the four of them appear. it is the story of marcius, a reverent man “who lived a solitary life in the mountain of marsico” (book 3, chapter 16), the modern monte massico, a mountain situated in the italian province of caserta. as gregory narrates, marcius lived a solitary life in “a narrow and straight cave” (geological marker) where one day he managed to cause water to be “sprung (…) out of the hollow rock” (hydrological). however, the very same day a “serpent alone would come into the cave where he lived also alone, and when he was at his prayers, it would cast itself before him, and when he took his rest, it would lie down by his side” (zoological). the holy man was not at all dismayed at this and often talked to the snake, until, after three years of this cohabitation, the serpent “made a great hissing, and tumbling himself down by the side of the mountain, he consumed all the bushes and shrubs with fire” (botanical). the next step was the creation of a digital map of central italy. we opted for a multilayered outline in which users could select four different maps by clicking the layer control icon. the first map is the open street map (osm) as part of the collaborative project that goes under the same name: it contains 6 i want to thank specifically the director of the neukom institute, dan rockmore; the colleagues in research computing with whom i collaborated, especially steven gaughan, douglas hill, and john wallace; and the dartmouth student who worked on the initial database with me, wes kendrick. i avail myself of this opportunity to thank also hailey lavoy and martin bloomer who generously brought gregory’s dialogues to my attention and with whom i had several conversations about this work and its importance. finally, my gratitude goes to the anonymous reviewers of this article. humanist studies & the digital age benvegnù 6.1 (2019) 78 fine detail on roads and footpaths and it would be helpful if users contemplate visiting a site mentioned in the dialogues (fig.1). figure 1. open street map. there are then a “satellite map” and a “street/terrain map” which may both help visualize the landscape (fig. 2 & 3). figure 2. satellite map. humanist studies & the digital age benvegnù 6.1 (2019) 79 figure 3. street/terrain map. finally, we decided to have a “roman map” that shows features from the time of imperial rome, somewhat before gregory's day (fig. 4). figure 4. roman map. it is less detailed than present day maps, so one may not be able to select roman if they zoom in too far, but it offers the toponymy of the time, the same used by gregory in the original latin. given the importance of people’s movement and travel in the dialogues, the roman map also contains the major roman roads radiating from the capital of the empire to the various provinces. we are also humanist studies & the digital age benvegnù 6.1 (2019) 80 contemplating introducing further maps featuring, for example, the different ecosystems or land uses, but they are not currently part of the platform. we then inserted the markers for each category into the multilayered map. users can view markers from more than one category at once, but markers from identical locations may obscure each other, so we decided to allow users to switch off one or more category if they are unable to click on the marker they want. to facilitate the navigation of the platform we also added clusters. so, if two or more markers from the same category are close enough to overlap, they are replaced by a colored circle, with a number showing how many markers it represents. when a user clicks on the circle, the map zooms enough to separate at least one of the markers. if all the markers in the circle are all in the same location, they are redrawn on rays around the central locations, so that they are far apart enough to be clicked separately (fig. 5). figure 5. rays around a central location. lastly, when users click on a map marker, the text information panel appears, containing the relevant dialogues text (fig. 6). humanist studies & the digital age benvegnù 6.1 (2019) 81 figure 6. text information panel. currently, only the english translation is available, but we created in advance space for the original latin as well as for the italian translation. a user can drag and resize this panel if it is inconveniently placed. in the top of this panel is a view today link. clicking this will bring up a google maps street view for the location. of course, the actual location for an event related in a miracle story written 1500 years ago must be quite approximate, so users can enjoy the view if they would like to see the contemporary landscape, but they should not expect to see most of the environmental features described in the dialogues. for this feature, we are currently using google maps, which unfortunately has no imagery for some of the most remote locations. the next step for the dbp would be to provide all these marked locations and their respective miracle stories with team of scholars capable of producing both interand extra-textual hyper-linked narratives. for example, to return to the story mentioned earlier, a team might focus on cerbonius and the bear and produce: an interpretation of the meaning of bears in gregory’s work and in this story in particular; a zoological account of possible bear species present in the italian peninsula; a historical (diachronic) reconstruction of the presence of bears in that specific territory; a list of other literary or visual accounts in which bears appear and their significance; a set of zoo-anthropological explorations about the relationship between bears and human beings in general and in that territory more specifically; a set of recorded contributions by local communities about the presence (or absence) of bears in their environment; a study on the importance of bears for the general ecology of that specific territory, etc. needless to say, these are only some of the directions each team can take, and the outcome will be determined by the specific interests of each team and open to further development. at the same, it will be crucial to engage not only with local communities and their specific knowledge of the territory, but also with the italian government (and potentially the eu). as i mentioned above, one of the aspirational goals of the dbp is to develop forms of environmentally and culturally responsible tourism in relation to the multi-faceted and interdisciplinary narratives created by the project, and therefore institutional support becomes paramount. a further development humanist studies & the digital age benvegnù 6.1 (2019) 82 of the project, at this point even too ambitious, is to create an application through which users can read the dialogues on their favorite electronic devices, follow the text to explore simultaneously the narratives created by the project and the locations, and eventually have direct access to those locals who would be willing to engage with this kind of environmentallyand culturally-conscious tourism. 4. conclusion in his vita gregorii magni, paul the deacon (c. 720-790) describes a moment in gregory’s life when gregory was dictating his homilies on ezechiel to his secretary through a veil drawn between the two of them. according to the legend, as the pope remained silent for long periods at a time, the servant made a hole in the curtain and, looking through, “beheld a dove seated upon gregory's head with its beak between his lips. when the dove withdrew its beak, the holy pontiff spoke and the secretary took down his words; but when he became silent the servant again applied his eye to the hole and saw the dove had replaced its beak between his lips” (xxviii). although the dove was meant to symbolize the holy spirit and therefore the divine inspiration moving gregory, when it comes to the dialogues the story also suggests a fascinating circularity: the source for gregory’s inspired stories about the nonhuman world and its crucial interaction with the human one comes from a nonhuman creature whispering (singing?) words into his mouth, which gregory then delivered to his human listener. in this article, i outlined how this potential circularity and reciprocity between the nonhuman environment and the human culture and society as described in some of gregory’s miracle stories in the dialogues can promote new ecological narratives, knowledge, and awareness. i have also briefly sketched out premises, major features, and potentials of my digital project based on gregory’s work, summarizing what has been done so far and what ought to be realized in the future. as i stated in the introduction, my hope is to create a community of scholars, students, and locals interested in participating in the project and advance its environmental agenda. in fact, i truly believe that deep mapping the sacred human-nonhuman interactions depicted in the dialogues would eventually create a new (culturally) sacred landscape and help protect these often overlooked and abandoned environments from that “filling” or riempimento that turri saw as an increasing dangerous possibly for italy. as frascaroli has pointed out in his preliminary study of the potential of sacred natural sites for biodiversity management in central italy, the link between sacredness and natural areas has rightly been deemed to offer crucial opportunities (587). the aim of the dbp is to leverage computer technology to provide a digital platform through which scholarly collaboration would help the sacred territories described in gregory’s dialogues re-acquire their eco-historical significance and therefore reconstruct a symbolic and material link between spiritual beliefs, human communities, and the environment. in a country like italy, whose patron saint is frances of assisi – who is also patron saint of animals and the natural environment – this should be considered a priority. however, different from what frascaroli aim, the dbp is not mainly meant to shed light on the sacred as “the possible ultimate source of a conservationist ethos” (588) and therefore to separate these spaces from the environmental and socio-economic struggles of local populations. instead, the radical ambition of the project is to provide those local communities with a tool meant to reestablish a meaningful and productive connection with their own environment and thus draw ecological as well humanist studies & the digital age benvegnù 6.1 (2019) 83 as economic progress. as cesaretti, iovino, and past write, “the lack of a bond between cultural identity, social awareness, and environmental protection is indeed at the core of the ecological crisis” (8). i agree with the editors of italy and the environmental humanities that italy needs now more than ever to concoct (environmental) progress with (economic and cultural) development, thus reinforcing “the mutual formative bond of humans and place, something which could constitute the premise for a healthy life, both in physical and political term” (8). the dbp is thus meant to be a tool for socioenvironmental justice and development rather than an element of conservationist ideology. ultimately, i hope this project will encourage communities to re-approach their natural settings in ecological terms, by engaging in dialogue with other experiences through history and literature. perhaps then we can slow the increasing abandonment of these landscapes to either real estate speculation or our (privileged) fantasies of pure, untouched wilderness. 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project 4. conclusion works cited humanist studies & the digital age, 7.1 (2022) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda/7.1.3 1 time of the end? more-than-human humanism and artificial intelligence massimo lollini abstract: the first part (“is there a future?”), discusses the idea of the future in the context of carl schmitt’s vision for the spatial revolutions of modernity, and then the idea of anthropocene, as a synonym for an environmental crisis endangering the very survival of humankind. from this point of view, the conquest of space and the colonization of mars at the center of futuristic and technocratic visions appear to be an attempt to escape from human responsibilities on earth. the second part (“ai and other hyperobjects”) discusses the extent of intellectual hubris expressed in computation, ai (garvin minsky e ray kurzweil), and the philosophy of computing and information (eric fredkin), involved in the elaboration of new theoretical assessments on the ultimate nature of reality. their vision is then contrasted and made to interact with that of philosopher timothy morton. he has taken the perspective of global warming and the possibility of ecological catastrophe seriously, avoiding all the futuristic enthusiasms and instead emphasizing the radical nature of the transformations that humans experience in the present. in this perspective, ai becomes one of the “hyperobjects,” like the internet or climate change, in which humans are immersed. morton’s hyperobjects delineate an uncanny view of the future; this uncanniness is not related to the supernatural but to the environment. the third section (“more-than-human-humanism”) further reflects on the “uncanniness” that human perceive in the encounters with the manifestations of hyperobjects. it also seeks to understand the human position in the face of the radical technological transformations induced by cybernetics and ai. this section discusses anti-humanism, transhumanism, and posthumanism within the broader category of more-than-human thought, which seems to be a more appropriate term to clarify the possible misunderstandings induced by the word “posthuman” and “transhuman.” the central question is not to empower (transhumanism) or disempower (posthumanism) humans, but to see them in relation to what is not human, including other animals, the environment, and the machine. the analysis considers the works of cary wolfe, jane bennet, bryant levi, among others, and introduces ethical debates on cyborgs, robots, and autonomous weapons systems (aws). the fourth section (“ethical perspectives”) continues this inquiry, concentrating on the non-standard ethical theories of luciano floridi (computer and information ethics) and david gunkel (the question of the machine). it examines the opportunity and feasibility of including in the discussion on the ethics of our time characterized by the pervasiveness of ai the notions of consciousness as theorized by emmanuel levinas’s humanism of the other and paul ricoeur’s oneself as another. http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 2 finally, the last section (“the time of the end?”) reflects on how the hyperobject, anthropocene, re-establishes a sense of limits in human history and confirms the special responsibility of human beings, and supports the need for a more-than-human-humanism. the latter, in other words, means intertwining ourselves with a unique ecosystem which cannot be overlooked and which restores meaning to our relationship with the past, present, and future. the awareness of the current challenges of technology can and must express itself in different forms of resistance to the adverse effects of ai in our lives. the ethical approach based on the persisting role of human consciousness is essential, but it must be coupled with human decision-making and political action. is there a future? as has always happened in human history, the achievement of flight is, in our time, the most potent and effective symbol of the human drive towards progress and futurism. we have witnessed a new era of the space in recent years, with preparation underway for actual human colonization. the protagonists of this new adventure are the so-called “space barons” – those who have created some of the wealthiest corporations globally, such as amazon and tesla, and revolutionized entire economic sectors ranging from retail and transport to air travel. starting from the first decade of the 2000s jeff bezos and elon musk are investing substantial portions of their vast fortunes to create space exploration technology corporations such as spacex and blue origin. these companies promise to transform space travel, colonize the solar system, make outer space available to the masses, and push human space travel beyond the point reached by international governments this far. in this same realm, we could remember richard branson. in 2004, after acquiring the technology behind spaceshipone, he vowed to create the world’s first commercial space line that commits to fly tourists over the edge of space, enabling them to have glimpses of the earth from above and experience a few minutes of zero gravity (davenport 11-15). according to some sectors of public opinion and the disseminators of the new technological-scientific prospect, the “space barons” are inventing a future as rich and far-reaching as a science fiction fantasy. in this perspective, the interplay between good and cheap electronics and increasingly reliable and sophisticated software is now “resulting in science fiction–worthy ideas we were promised long ago becoming a reality” (vance, 462-463). there are several reasons at the root of this enthusiastic leap towards the presumed future, among them a passion for rockets and space,1 the human search for the origins of the universe, ambitions for the passenger market, and the desire to perpetuate and expand a model of visionary entrepreneurship. nonetheless, this model remains focused on conquering the markets and appears to be driven by the exploitation of resources and pursuit of profit.2 from this point of view, nothing new under the sun, literally. what is truly unique (and not openly declared) is another motivation for the colonization of space: to escape the dire consequences of the destruction of the planet that humans are undertaking irresponsibly in the present. some isolated voices have indicated this present-future scenario with force and clarity. think, for instance, of the physicist stephen 1 for space travel enthusiasts, 2021 was a year full of records of space programs worldwide, and that momentum is carrying forward into 2022, which is set to be humanity’s busiest year in space. see chris impey’s article, “a lunar return, a jupiter moon, the most powerful rocket ever built and the james webb space telescope – space missions to watch in the coming months” (2022). 2 in this regard, it is noteworthy that in 2015, bezos’s blue origin and musk’s spacex convinced the congress and the obama administration to enact the commercial space launch competitiveness act that extends an exemption for commercial space companies from federal regulations allowing them to own any mining resources. https://theconversation.com/a-lunar-return-a-jupiter-moon-the-most-powerful-rocket-ever-built-and-the-james-webb-space-telescope-space-missions-to-watch-in-the-coming-months-175490?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily%20newsletter%20january%2028%202022%20-%202186921673&utm_content=daily%20newsletter%20january%2028%202022%20-%202186921673+version+a+cid_5d448958f9bd97c3ede99e5861aa38b7&utm_source=campaign_monitor_us&utm_term=a%20lunar%20return%20a%20jupiter%20moon%20the%20most%20powerful%20rocket%20ever%20built%20and%20the%20james%20webb%20space%20telescope%20%20space%20missions%20to%20watch%20in%20the%20coming%20months https://theconversation.com/a-lunar-return-a-jupiter-moon-the-most-powerful-rocket-ever-built-and-the-james-webb-space-telescope-space-missions-to-watch-in-the-coming-months-175490?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily%20newsletter%20january%2028%202022%20-%202186921673&utm_content=daily%20newsletter%20january%2028%202022%20-%202186921673+version+a+cid_5d448958f9bd97c3ede99e5861aa38b7&utm_source=campaign_monitor_us&utm_term=a%20lunar%20return%20a%20jupiter%20moon%20the%20most%20powerful%20rocket%20ever%20built%20and%20the%20james%20webb%20space%20telescope%20%20space%20missions%20to%20watch%20in%20the%20coming%20months https://theconversation.com/a-lunar-return-a-jupiter-moon-the-most-powerful-rocket-ever-built-and-the-james-webb-space-telescope-space-missions-to-watch-in-the-coming-months-175490?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily%20newsletter%20january%2028%202022%20-%202186921673&utm_content=daily%20newsletter%20january%2028%202022%20-%202186921673+version+a+cid_5d448958f9bd97c3ede99e5861aa38b7&utm_source=campaign_monitor_us&utm_term=a%20lunar%20return%20a%20jupiter%20moon%20the%20most%20powerful%20rocket%20ever%20built%20and%20the%20james%20webb%20space%20telescope%20%20space%20missions%20to%20watch%20in%20the%20coming%20months https://www.congress.gov/114/plaws/publ90/plaw-114publ90.pdf humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 3 hawking. he stated that a planetary disaster on earth is “near certainty” and that humanity is on a path to either disaster or the stars. he held that by the time of earth’s wreckage, “we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so it would not mean the end of the human race.” however, he added, “we will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least the next hundred years, so we have to be very careful in this period” (dockrill). on the level of geopolitical theory, a significant visionary although critical analysis of the human projection towards the stars can be found in the work of carl schmitt entitled land and sea, published in the original german edition in 1942. his vision can help us place the current race to space in the context of the enormous spatial and elemental transformations that have marked human civilization, which we can still teach us a lesson. reconnecting in some way to ancient pre-socratic doctrines, schmitt conceives the history of humanity as a journey through the four elements – earth, water, fire, and air – to which great spatial revolutions correspond. humans have been exclusively terrestrial for centuries, and the earth represented the only space to occupy and colonize. therefore, the earth is the essential space of humans even if schmitt recognizes the sea as the primary cause of all life in mythical and pre-socratic memory. in mythology, aphrodite is born from the foam of the sea and thales of miletus identifies water as the primal element (2-3). things changed profoundly with the “space revolution” of the modern age, which saw the english maritime power conquer the sea and then colonize the entire globe by leveraging a de-territorialized state (28-34; 52-53). land and sea focuses on analyzing the planetary changes induced by this extraordinary transformation that affected all aspects of human life. modernity coincides with the affirmation of the “nomos of the sea” which replaces the “nomos of the earth” (46-47). in the new nomos, infinity becomes the new horizon of humans, along with unconditioned, rapid movement, unrestrained power, total warfare, and the force of technology without limits. the new steamboat technology transformed whale hunting into unregulated extermination done with cannons and electric gadgets (14-15). with the end of the jus publicum europeaum, war was no longer and not only earth warfare that concerned states and armies exclusively. rather, it became naval warfare based on the idea that the enemy’s trade and economy were also at the center of the conflict. for schmitt, the american civil war, which saw the advent of the armored steamship, marks the beginning of the modern, industrial, and economic wars (46-47; 53). the change is so pervasive that “all the spiritual trends of the early modern centuries —renaissance, humanism, reformation, counter-reformation, and baroque—have each in their ways contributed to the spatial revolution as a whole” (36-37). the most profound transformation was not the quantitative enlargement of the geographical horizon or the discovery of new continents and oceans. the fact that the spherical shape of our planet was becoming a tangible reality does not seem decisive either. that revolution had far more significant repercussions: “the truly decisive factor was the appearance of the cosmic dimension and of the concept of the infinite void” (34). the scientific reflection that accompanies and expands the space revolution – from copernicus to kepler, bruno, galileo, and newton – leads humans to understand that “the stars, masses of matter, move while the forces of attraction and repulsion balance each other in an infinite void, in virtue of the laws of gravitation” (34). for schmitt, natural elements maintain their symbolic and analytical value even in modern science, which has simplified and consolidated them into the 90 chemical elements of the periodic table. however, he does not want to establish deterministic links between humans and the environments in which they live because, as he claims, human beings can live even outside their terrestrial natural environment. schmitt had in mind not https://www.sciencealert.com/stephen-hawking-says-a-planetary-disaster-on-earth-is-a-near-certainty https://www.sciencealert.com/stephen-hawking-says-a-planetary-disaster-on-earth-is-a-near-certainty humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 4 only water and the maritime environment – which in modernity have become the privileged dimension of the ordering of human life – but also the air and the sky. in the last chapter of land and sea, schmitt addresses this new level of the planetary spatial revolution. the invention and military use of the airplane during ww1 marked the conquest of the third element, after land and sea. hence man’s potentialities to dominate nature and his fellow humans received the most comprehensive scope (57). however, schmitt recommends caution in this regard, as implications of the new spatial revolution are not all at the tips of humans’ fingers. nonetheless, the latest stage of the space revolution has produced a notable change in the concept of space. in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, humans thought that the world found itself in an empty space, “nowadays, space is no longer mere depth, void of contents that can be reflected upon. space has become the field of man’s energy, activity, and creativity” (59). according to schmitt, it is in the context of the spatial revolution of the sixteen and seventeenth centuries that the utopian idea originates. not by chance, it was thomas more, an englishman, the author of utopia (1516). turning away from the topos to a u-topos, he is representative of a broader world-historical spatial revolution that allowed humans to conceive of empty space and a new sense of nothingness. schmitt has no sympathy for utopian philosophies, which, according to him, contributes to delocalizing the idea of law, making it unworkable as it loses any connection with the earth. he reads the very conception of utopia from the beginning in dystopic terms and collapses the distinction between utopia and dystopia. for him, there is a close relationship between the new idea of space, the technological revolution, the emergence of utopian thought, and the end of the earth’s nomos as a prelude to the complete mastery of the natural world. however, he does not support the domination of technicity that emerged with modernity and leads humans toward annihilation (smeltzer, 108-112). in this perspective, we understand his resistance to proclaiming the “splendid and progressive destiny”3 of humanity, even in the last space revolution, the one that takes place in times closer to our own and finds enthusiast supporters in the “space barons”. schmitt is undoubtedly one of the most controversial intellectuals of twentieth century4 but his theory of the great spaces in which human civilization has evolved cannot be accused of uncritically supporting the conquest of the sea and the space. indeed, as we will see in the last part of the essay, he remains a thinker deeply tied to the earth. those who do not follow the sirens of future progress refer to the centrality of the earth for human destiny. bill mckibben more than thirty years ago in his end of nature (1989), delivered one of the earliest warnings about the danger of climate change. more recently, in his falter: has the human game begun to play itself out? (2019) he reminds us that the danger is broader than climate change, which is shrinking the space in which human civilization can exist. he now points to the danger posed by new technologies like ai and robotics that threaten to obliterate the diversity of the human experience. in essence, he invites us to consider that scientific and technological progress, even if it will succeed in establishing a human colony on mars, would not escape the laws of space, where “just as with climate change on earth, physics and biology ultimately rule.” in this 3 the expression “splendid and progressive destiny” comes from the ginestra o il fiore del deserto (broom, or the flower of the desert), one of leopardi’s last poems, where he uses it ironically. “dipinte in queste rive / son dell’umana gente / le magnifiche sorti e progressive.” “inscribed on these slopes you’ll find / mankind’s / splendid and progressive destiny” (leopardi, la ginestra, vv. 49-51; pp. 72 and 75). 4 he was a german legal, constitutional, and political theorist, that participated in different ways in the nazi legal system. his anti-semitism and anti-liberalism, along with his theoretical justifications of dictatorship and rule by exception, undoubtedly remain highly problematic. for a recent assessment of his complex personality that inspires scholars on both the left and the right see meierhenrich and simons. it is remarkable, that schmitt’s work attracted the attention of intellectuals like hannah arendt, walter benjamin, giorgio agamben and jacques derrida, among others. humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 5 perspective, the outstanding progress announced by the “space barons” is nothing but minor accomplishments. it is unlikely to deflect any trends now governing the planet because, “everything we learn about life in space makes it clear that we’re not going to get a second chance there” (347). in this regard, he mentions the cosmic rays from the stars that can create a risk of cancer greater than the risk of a spaceflight accident. moreover, he points to a 2014 national academy of sciences report that lists nine health risks for a mars mission (including heart damage from radiation, food and medicine instability, and poor psychological health) that are at an “unacceptable level” (348). in mckibben’s view, even if humans do become able to cross the 50 million miles that separate them from mars to escape their responsibilities on earth, they will not even be able to obtain a decent life. to survive, they will still have to go underground, but they can already do this on earth if they want, writes mckibben. not by chance “grounded” is the title of the epilogue to falter: has the human game begun to play itself out?. mckibben concludes, “the single most inhospitable cubic meter of the earth’s surface – some waste of saharan sand, some rocky himalayan outcrop – is a thousand times more hospitable than the most appealing corner of mars or jupiter.” (356-357). clear and decisive stances like this one by mckibben appear more and more reasonable. on closer inspection, they do not invite us to condemn technology and scientific progress per se. on the contrary, they want to invite us to distance ourselves from the hubris that accompanies an uncontrolled use of technology, which is neither oriented around the search for overall well-being nor demarcated by a sense of the limits inherent to the human condition. likewise, schmitt also concluded land and sea with the reference to human limits. he argues that they, too, would be possible in the new dimension of space: “there is nothing to show that what is to come will perforce be nothing but chaos or nothingness, inimical to any nomos” (schmitt 59). it is precisely the absence of the sense of a limit, implicit in living in an “eternal present” and in this projection towards space, that distances humans from the ethical use of technology and ultimately deprives them of a true vision of the future. james bridle in his recent new dark age: technology and the end of the future (2018) sees the unpredictability of the future as directly linked to the actual use of computation that conflates past and future. for bridle, technology’s increasing inability to predict the future stems directly from the misapprehensions about the neutrality and comprehensibility of computation. as a result, technology is doing nothing more than confirming the instability of the present, from the fluctuating markets of digital stock exchanges to the accelerating instability of the global climate (45). the model of reality organized as gathered data and then projected forward is assumed not to diverge from past experiences. in other words, computation governs our actions in the present and, at the same time, constructs a future based on the same parameters: that which is possible becomes that which is computable. that which is hard to quantify and difficult to model, that which has not been seen before or which does not map onto established patterns, that which is uncertain or ambiguous, is excluded from the field of possible futures. computation projects a future that is like the past – which makes it, in turn, incapable of dealing with the reality of the present, which is never stable. (bridle 59) ai and other hyperobjects computation and ai express a pervasive intellectual hubris of mythic proportions. the new spatial revolution they contribute to implementing follows a similar pattern to that of early modernity with the emergence of utopian/dystopian thought. however, the new space revolution that projects humans into humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 6 extraterrestrial space takes on much more unprecedented, destabilizing, and disturbing proportions; it further motivates the protagonists of the ai to think of themselves in grandiose terms and as nothing less than creators of life, akin to god-like figures (turkle 237). they are developing the philosophy of computing and information – what eric fredkin calls “digital philosophy”– involved in elaborating new theoretical perspectives on the ultimate nature of reality. “digital philosophy suggests that not only can computers model all aspects of physics, but in theory, a computer could model those aspects exactly” (fredkin 201). the most radical thesis advanced by this philosophy is that computation is a tool to simulate not just reality but rather the ontological ground of reality itself, something that supersedes notions of matter and life as the core of philosophical reflections. for the philosopher eric steinhart, “if our universe is digital, then all the things in it are too, including human bodies and brains” (steinhart 183). the physicist tommaso toffoli argues that “physics itself may draw fresh insights and productive methodological tools from looking at the world as an ongoing computation.” in this sense “computation -whether by man or by machine-is a physical activity.” he asks, “what else can we use to make our models of the world but pieces of the world itself?” he suggests using the term “information mechanics” as appropriate for this unified approach to physics and computation (toffoli 165, 174). ai and computation are methods and cultures that impose themselves on all disciplines. sherry turkle sees in them a “politics of colonization” that soon takes on a life of its own. all disciplines and fields of knowledge are invaded by ai, which soon considers them pure superstitions in the face of a superior “scientific effectiveness”: “ai first declared the need for psychological theories that would work on machines. the next step was to see these alternatives as better – better because they can be ‘implemented,’ better because they are more ‘scientific’” (turkle 230). behind the implementation of ai, pure mathematics and programming lead the protagonists to think of creation free from the constraints of matter enabled through the computer. turkle describes the ai culture that has developed around marvin minsky – one of the fathers of computer science and co-founder of the artificial intelligence laboratory at mit– as the creation of scientists and engineers whose greatest pleasure was building worlds out of pure mind. in this perspective they conceived the mind itself, both that of robots and humans, as a product of programming. a fundamental element of ai-based constructions and projects includes attention to structures and processes, especially those that tend to displace human subjects and their role in the system into which they are inserted. for minsky, what is important about “life” is the mind and the structures that the mind can create or find. he considers organic life as a “bloody mess” unworthy of the attention of ai (turkle 233). the pervasive intellectual hubris of ai scientists leads them to challenge centuries-old ideas and principles such as the idea of truth and the principle of non-contradiction. these concepts were important for philosophy, but they are useless for ai’s “new philosophy” that can do without them. ai scientist roger schank puts the idea of “process” at the core of ai practices and argues that the old philosophical questions should be analyzed “in terms of what we do, in terms of how we approach and operate on these things rather than on truth” (turkle 237). the highest challenge that ai has advanced is the very concept of “life” itself, which is no longer conceptualized within the restrictions imposed by the organic and biological world. ai scientists want to overcome the idea that a computer cannot do things, like possessing consciousness and, therefore, life. ray kurzweil, an international authority on ai and scientific futurism, in his 1990 the age of spiritual machines considers a key issue of our time: “whether machines will evolve into beings with consciousness and free will” (kurzweil 798). he purports a need for serious speculation on the potential sentience (that is, humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 7 consciousness) of computer-based intelligence that will eventually attribute moral recognition to machines with enough self-consciousness (kurzweil 527). in this perspective, the problem arises from the relational agency between humans and the robots that invade their lives in an ever more pervasive way. humans and intelligent machines collaborate increasingly through computation in the most varied of fields and activities, from medical diagnoses to literary translations, industrial projects to agricultural activities, and musical composition to creative writing. no field remains excluded. in his the singularity is near: when humans transcend biology (2005), kurzweil imagines a future in which technological change becomes so rapid and so profound that our bodies and brains will merge with our machines. this vision, which a few years ago could still seem futuristic, is beginning to be realized in our present. we see this in corporations like neuralink, a neurotechnology company developing implantable brain-machine interfaces that was founded in 2016 by elon musk and others. projects like neuralink are revolutionizing how we learn and pose significant privacy and rights issues marking the digital age. the futuristic ai scientists minsky and kurzweil share this faith in the relentless growth of future technology toward a universe in which ai and nanotechnology combine to bring unimaginable wealth and longevity, not merely to our descendants but some of those living today. both supported the idea of possible human immortality and contributed essays to a volume on the scientific conquest of death compiled, and edited by members of the online organization, immortality institute. kurzweil in his essay, “human body version 2.0,”5 holds that in the coming decades, a radical upgrading of our body’s physical and mental systems, already underway, will use nanobots to augment and ultimately replace our organs. he predicts that “by 2030, reverse engineering of the human brain will have been completed and non-biological intelligence will merge with our biological brains” (kurzweil 93). he concludes that by becoming more intimate with our technology inserted routinely into our bodies and brains, we are becoming “cyborgs,” more non-biological than biological. in other words, he believes that “as the technologies become established, there will be no barriers to using them for the expansion of human potential” (kurzweil 103). along these lines, minsky in “will robots inherit the earth?”6 holds that once delivered from the limitations of biology, “we will be able to decide the length of our lives – with the option of immortality – and choose among other, unimagined capabilities as well” (123). he argues with the “old philosophers” that deny cyborgs real life for lacking some form of vital essences such as the soul or consciousness. he replies to them that old philosophy “is flawed in the same way: by assuming the thing that it purports to prove – the existence of some magical spark that has no detectable properties” (minsky 131). for minsky, “no popular ethical system yet, be it humanist or religion-based, has shown itself able to face the challenges that already confront us.” he has in mind how many people should occupy earth, what sorts of people they should be, or how they should share the available space (minsky 132). interestingly, minsky does not mention any attempt to escape from earth to space to solve the problem of life on earth. still, his robotic vision does not appear conceived for life on earth, as it does not address the environmental crisis that we now face. although ai has been around for about half a century, the question of environmental impact – and related ethical issues is only arising now as we realize that ai can help humans find solutions for climate change but might also be part of the problem.7 the future of unlimited expansion of 5 this article can be read on kurzweil website at https://www.kurzweilai.net/human-body-version-20 6 this essay was originally published in scientific american in october 1994. 7 on ai environmental impact see kate crawford, atlas of ai: power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. https://neuralink.com/%22%20/t%20%22_blank https://www.longecity.org/forum/page/index.html https://www.kurzweilai.net/human-body-version-20 humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 8 human capacities that it heralds is inextricably linked to the issues of our present. despite being presented as full of luminous promises, it appears to rather be a blind spot – precisely because of its inability to respond to the urgent problems humans face now and to contend with the long shadow of the past. the philosopher timothy morton, who has taken the issue of global warming and the possibility of ecological catastrophe seriously, has avoided all the futuristic enthusiasms of ai scientists and preferred to emphasize the radical nature of the transformations that humans experience in the present. it is a real “earthquake in being” that initiated the disappearance of the world as we have known it in the past. our daily experience leads us to think that we do not inhabit a world and instead find ourselves within what morton calls “hyperobjects,” such as the internet, ai, the global climate, radiation, nuclear weapons, and the very evolution of life on earth. a hyperobject is also connected to the theory of relativity, which introduced the idea of time and space as emergent properties of objects. human events are now projected onto a horizon in which the old anthropocentric concepts of time, space, world, nature, and even the environment are no longer enough to find meaning. indeed, it is not easy to understand the very idea of hyperobjects as we are immersed in them. their properties include “viscosity” as they “stick” to beings that are involved with them; “nonlocality” as any “local manifestation” of a hyperobject is not directly the hyperobject; and “interobjectivity” as they can be detected only in interrelationships between objects. moreover, they manifest themselves in different temporalities that escape the common human-scale ones. morton has in mind for example some very large hyperobjects, such as planets, that “have genuinely gaussian temporality: they generate spacetime vortices, due to general relativity” (1). the sense of displacement that we are experiencing for morton derives from the fact that humans have not come to terms with the profound post-kantian shift, represented by the theory of relativity: “it’s a false cliché that we have grasped the meaning of relativity. far from it. in our daily social and psychic practices, we are still newtonians, still in awe of infinite space, and behind that in awe of the infinite god of infinite space” (morton 63). humans resist the idea of gaussian temporality, the notion that space and time are intrinsically connected not as an empty box, but rather an “undulating force field that emanates from objects.” humans contend that object are never as they seem; however, this does not happen “because objects are ideas in their head but because they aren’t” (morton 64). nonetheless, during the epoch of the anthropocene humans have gradually come to realize that “they are not running the show, at the very moment of their most powerful technical mastery on a planetary scale” (morton 164). for this reason, hyperobjects profoundly change how we think about any object. somehow every object is a hyperobject as “we can only think this thought in light of the ecological emergency inside of which we have now woken up” (morton 201). the perspective drawn by morton is certainly “uncanny,” as the prospect of the disappearance of “nature” – combined with the loss of the archaic myths through which the ancients had understood it – must have seemed uncanny to the romantics. but the uncanniness described in morton’s book, as in amitav ghosh's the great derangement: climate change and the unthinkable (2016), is no longer related to the supernatural. the romantics attributed it to a feeling of mystery and infinity in the face of the natural spectacle perceived (or not) in religious terms. the uncanny was then about phenomena and landscapes that could still be defined as sublime and therefore brought back to a human measure in kant’s interpretation. the famous painting wanderer above the sea of fog (1818) by caspar david friedrich and the poem infinite (1819) by giacomo leopardi are emblematic of this romantic attitude. both can be considered as an on-a-volcano meditation (2021), pp.23-51. see also annette ekin’s ai can help us fight climate change. but it has an energy problem, too (2019). https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-magazine/ai-can-help-us-fight-climate-change-it-has-energy-problem-too humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 9 expressing romantic philosophy’s idealism. the feeling of the spatial and temporal infinity that the italian poet’s imagination perceives in the face of the natural barrier preventing a complete vision and appreciation of the landscape, is undoubtedly uncanny. the hedge, like the fog in friedrich’s painting, “hides the entire horizon.” the poet explicitly states, “in this immensity my thoughts all drown” but immediately adds, “and it’s easeful to be wrecked in seas like these” (leopardi 3). thus, the romantic poet reaffirms the anchorage to a human measure. the uncanny we are experiencing in our time is above all environmental. the view of the natural spectacle no longer occurs “from above”8 as it did in ancient philosophy up to romanticism. when we admire a landscape today, we realize more and more that we are entangled in the viscosity of the hyperobject we call global warming. as morton writes, “the more we know about radiation, global warming, and the other massive objects that show up on our radar, the more enmeshed in them we realize we are” (160). we continue to go to the mountains to seek a spiritual dimension, but this experience is increasingly questioned by the discovery of the signs of the decline of human civilization. on the mountains, we are no longer (or not only) struck by the sense of infinity and mystery of the fossils from geological eras different from ours. we are struck by the waste of our civilization we can also find on the highest mountains as evidence of our responsibilities.9 thus, as morton writes, “we have discovered that we are already falling inside the abyss, which is not pure empty space, but instead the fiery interior of a hyperobject” (160). more-than-human-humanism for amitav ghosh, the “uncanniness” we perceive in the encounters with the manifestations of an hyperobject such as the climate change “lies precisely in the fact that in these encounters we recognize something we had turned away from: that is to say, the presence and proximity of non-human interlocutors” (46). thus, the epiphanies of the climate change, such as the wildfires plaguing the pacific northwest where i myself live, trigger a new sense of recognition, “an awareness that humans were never alone, that we have always been surrounded by beings of all sorts who share elements of that which we had thought to be most distinctively our own: the capacities of will, thought, and consciousness” (gosh 46). the realization that forests are part of the same hyperobject as humans and the earth leads us to recognize their agency, as non-human forces that “have the ability to intervene directly in human thought.” this recognition is immediately followed by another even more disturbing one, the “suspect that all the time that we imagined ourselves to be thinking about apparently inanimate objects, we were ourselves being ‘thought’ by other entities” (gosh 47). reflections like this one developed by ghosh are also found in contemporary anthropology which, to face the challenges of the anthropocene, studies the importance of the worldviews elaborated by indigenous peoples who lived on the margins of western civilization, immersed in the natural environment notwithstanding their proximity with the long shade of colonial past.10 8 scientific knowledge in ancient culture was often combined with ethical reflections. something that has been lost in the evolution of modern science. the vehicle of these reflections was the idea of the possibility of a vision from above. see what stoic philosopher seneca (c. 4 bc – ad65) writes in his naturales questiones (natural questions), which i have translated and discussed in my blog entry the view from above. 9 the sedimentation of the anthropocene characteristic waste has violated every hill, every mountain, every cave. the mountain has been commodified, reduced to tourist attraction, with its luxury hotels, chair lifts and artificial lights that obscure the night light of the starry sky. even on the highest peak of earth, mount everest, waste is a serious threat to environmental sustainability. it is estimated that some 50 tons of mountaineering rubbish have accumulated beyond the everest base camp. see my blog entry on sustainable tourism. 10 see edoardo kohn, how forests think: toward an anthropology beyond the human (2015). he writes that the survival of https://maxiloll.blog/2019/06/12/the-view-from-above/ https://maxiloll.blog/2019/07/12/on-sustainable-mountain-tourism-and-other-things/ humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 10 does all this mean that the moment has come when human civilization and culture can set aside the notion of the human being? the anthropological approach generally answers this question in a negative way. 11 however, it should be remembered that claude lévi-strauss, the father of structural anthropology, in his groundbreaking la pensée sauvage (1962) claimed that the ultimate goal of the human sciences does not consist in “constituting man” (constituer l’homme), but in dissolving him (mais de le dissoudre). nonetheless, as he explains, “dissolving” in no way implies (and even excludes) the destruction of the constituent parts of the body subjected to the action of another body (lévi-strauss 417-418). in other words, the human sciences’ goal is not to prove nor justify their subjective awareness; for the anthropological approach, the knowledge learned through humans does not belong to the cartesian cogito but the world because humans are not distinguished from the world as separate beings. the intellectual climate in which lévi-strauss presented his reflections in 1960s france to which louis althusser and jacques lacan contributed, among others, has been read in an “anti-humanist” light. michel foucault is the philosopher that more than any other had contributed to this interpretation when he wrote in his les mots et les choses (1966), that that the very idea of human being and anthropology itself has a time of historical and contingent beginning and therefore, a possible end.12 indeed, intellectuals such as lévi-strauss, althusser, lacan, and foucault (and after them, jacques derrida and gilles deleuze) contributed in different ways to creating the premises of the philosophy we now call posthumanist.13 several critical orientations must be analyzed to understand some of the most relevant facets the runa of ecuador’s upper amazon, that he studied in four years of field-work, depend on their ability to interact with the many creatures that inhabit one of the world’s most complex ecosystems: “the spirit realm that emerges from the life of the forest, as a product of a whole host of relations that cross species lines and temporal epochs, is, then, a zone of continuity and possibility” (195). 11 in the epilogue to his research edoardo kohn writes, “having ventured beyond the human, and without losing sight of what that offers, i steered this anthropology back to the ‘all too human’ –clarifying why this approach that i advocate is an anthropological approach, and not, say, an ecological one that agnostically charts multispecies relations. in the runa’s journeys beyond the human, in their struggles to communicate with those animals and spirits that ‘people’ that vast ecology of selves that extends beyond them, they don’t want to stop being human” (224-225). 12 foucault writes, “it is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man’s disappearance. for this void does not create a deficiency; it does not constitute a lacuna that must be filled. it is nothing more, and nothing less, than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think” (373). however, the importance of philosophy and therefore also of the human does not disappear from foucault’s reflection. here we must remember above all the last foucault who in le courage de la vérité: cours au collège de france (1983-1984) (the courage of the truth: lectures at the collège of france), reflects on the link between lifestyle and testimony of truth in ancient philosophy, especially in the cynicism but without forgetting stoicism and platonism. the lived or reflected consciousness that had been set aside from philosophical reflection in the 1960s in the name of the primacy of the concept, system or structure, undoubtedly resurfaces in foucault’s last lectures. 13 for a good introduction to the complex problem of anti-humanism see pierpaolo cesaroni: “‘pensare nel vuoto dell’uomo scomparso.’ l’antiumanismo nella filosofia francese contemporanea” (2015). i have argued elsewhere (lollini 2008) that the contemporary anthropological interpretation of the historical humanism that developed in europe, particularly in italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, appears too one-sided and conditioned by the evolution of modern cartesian philosophy. just think of the scientific humanism of leonardo da vinci and the philosophy of giordano bruno. the new dramatic historical events of colonization and the new scientific paradigm led bruno to recognize and admit a new notion of unitas inclusive of all possible differences and otherness. the new philosophy proposed by bruno erases the primacy of the human and the possibility of ontological and anthropological differences among human beings and between human beings and animals. on leonardo see stephane toussaint “leonardo filosofo dei contrari. appunti sul ‘chaos’” (2005) and marco versiero “a similitudine de la farfalla a’ lume. l’umanesimo scientifico di leonardo da vinci” (2015). on giordano bruno see michele ciliberto il sapiente furore: vita di giordano bruno (2020). for a recent re-evaluation of the at times contradictory complexity and richness of historical humanism see massimo cacciari, la mente inquieta: saggio sull'umanesimo (2019). humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 11 of this line of thought and the new context in which it arises. in what follows, i try to explore some crucial aspects by interpreting these critical positions within the category of more-than-human thought, which seems to be the most meaningful – even if least common – for criticism. it seems to be more appropriate to use this category to clarify the possible misunderstandings induced by the word posthuman and because all the philosophers that i am about to analyze, even if they declare themselves posthumanists, refuse to completely abandon the idea of “human being.” but even in this respect there are, as we shall see, significant differences. before anything else, it should be emphasized that there are two opposite ways of conceiving this very general category. the first, developed by so-called transhumanism, does nothing but enhance and empower the human as such and appears as a continuation of the traditional idea of humanism as an anticipation of modern philosophy and cartesianism. the second, instead, questions the anthropocentrism of the humanist vision, strictly understood, by developing a worldview in which the human being loses its privileged position. this second direction of more-than-human thought is embraced by philosophies that define themselves as posthuman, which in turn are divided into different threads.14 to anticipate and summarize my point of view on these questions, i must say that i prefer to use the expression more-than-human because the central question is not to empower (transhumanism) or disempower (posthumanism) human beings but to learn to see them in relation to that which is not human, including other animals, the environment and the machine. in other words, i do not use the more-than-human expression in a vertical sense, but in a horizontal logic, also because i find it at least inappropriate in our time to speak of the divinization or cancellation of the human. in his brief history of transhumanist thought, nick bostrom conceives transhumanism as the fulfillment of renaissance humanism combined with the influence of isaac newton, thomas hobbes, john locke, immanuel kant, the marquis de condorcet, and others to form the basis for rational humanism. transhumanism, “emphasizes empirical science and critical reason – rather than revelation and religious authority– as ways of learning about the natural world and our place within it, and of providing a grounding for morality.” bostrom concludes, “transhumanism has its roots in rational humanism” (2). along the same lines, as has been argued several times in humanist studies and the digital age, the roots of computer culture and technology can be seen in the technology of the early-printed text.15 indeed, many of the functions and effects of the modern computer were imagined, anticipated, or even sought after long before the invention of modern digital computing technology. in this perspective, transhumanism looks like a radicalization of renaissance utopias in the new spatial revolution of late modernity. as in renaissance utopias, transhumanism imagines a human being free from all physical and intellectual limitations, but this transrational being is now conceived as a transition to a new form of the human, an enhanced and further empowered one. in the previous section, we have already seen some striking manifestations of this transhumanism in robotic humans and cyborgs developed by ai as conceived by minsky and kurzweil. if transhumanism can be considered the fulfillment of certain aspects of rational humanism, posthumanism, in turn, can be considered – despite the different nuances of the various posthuman tendencies – as the final stage of transhumanism. on the one hand, transhumanism wants to reaffirm humans’ sovereignty over themselves and claims to embody an intermediate step between the human and a new form 14 for a comprehensive introduction to the different aspects and trends of posthumanism see posthuman glossary (2020) edited by rosi braidotti and maria hlavajova. 15 see for instance massimo lollini “circles: networks of reading.” humanist studies & the digital age [online], 4.1 (2015): 1-34. for a broader approach see jonathan sawday, engines of the imagination: renaissance culture and the rise of the machine. (2007), and neil rhodes, and jonathan sawday, the renaissance computer: knowledge technology in the first age of print (2006). http://journals.library.oregonstate.edu/hsda humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 12 beyond the human. on the other hand, posthumanism announces and asserts the actual realization and implementation of systems that are already non-human; this is due to relations involving multiple agencies that do not grant any ontological primacy to the human. in what is posthumanism?, wolfe does not reject the human but recontextualizes it by removing it from the ontologically-closed domain of consciousness, reason, and reflection. the human is now conceived part of the “entire sensorium of other living beings and their own autopoietic ways of ‘bringing forth a world’” (wolfe 2010, xxv). here, wolfe has in mind the chilean biologists marturana’s and varela’s notion of autopoiesis. they conceive “systems, including bodies” which “are both open and closed as the very condition of possibility for their existence (open on the level of structure to energy flows, environmental perturbations, and the like, but closed on the level of selfreferential organization” (xxiv-xxv). given this autopoietic dimension, the human appears to be “the product of processes that are, strictly speaking, inhuman and ahuman” (wolfe 2019, 358). the emphasis on the relational nature of identities and agencies puts in question the very idea of “identity” (and “identity politics”), and challenges not only the separation between subject and objects, humans and other animals, 16 but also that between the living and the non-living. in “posthuman” culture, agency is given to sentient and insentient beings, including objects. in vibrant matter (2010), jane bennet theorizes an “affect” not specific to human bodies; this is a sort of vibrant energy that is deeply impersonal, “an affect intrinsic to forms that cannot be imagined (even ideally) as persons.” drawing on this notion of affect, which has roots in spinoza’s philosophy, bennet highlights the capacity of any body for activity and responsiveness and “the agency of the things that produce (helpful, harmful) effect in human and other bodies” (xii). she refers to a tradition of materialism that, besides spinoza, includes epicurus, diderot, and deleuze among others, to theorize “a vitality intrinsic to materiality as such, and to detach materiality from figures of passive, mechanistic, or divinely infused substance” (xiii). along these lines, bryant r. levi in the democracy of objects (2011) attempts “to think the being of objects unshackled from the gaze of humans in their being for-themselves” (19). he is part of a philosophical trend named object-oriented-ontology (ooo) that theorizes the possibility of knowing the objects qua objects, independently from human subjects. the human does not disappear, but it is decentralized: it becomes an object among others (20). bryant rejects epistemological realism (pro-science) and anti-realism (social constructivist) philosophies that ultimately limit the question of the objects to a particular relation between humans and objects. for bryant this is not an epistemological question, “not a question of how we know the object, but a question of what objects are” (18). in other words, it is an ontological question irreducible to questions of epistemology. every object is independent of any other entity and exceeds any form of presentation and representation of other things. finally, bryant’s ooo views the deep nature of an object as “virtual proper being,” namely, “its being as substance, or its being as a (more or less) enduring unity.” therefore, “no one nor any other thing ever encounters an object qua its virtual proper being, for the substance of an object is perpetually withdrawn or in excess of any of its manifestations” (88). 16 as regards the challenge to the ontological separation between humans and other animals, see the essay by martha nussbaum’s “beyond compassion and humanity: justice for nonhuman animals” that tries to set aside the anthropomorphism implicit in contractual and utilitarian views of “animal rights”. she writes: “a truly global justice requires not simply that we look across the world for other fellow species members who are entitled to a decent life. it also requires looking around the world at the other sentient beings with whose lives our own are inextricably and complexly intertwined” (319). on the difficulty and failure of language to capture the vulnerability of humans and animals see the essays by cora diamond and cary wolfe in cavel, et al. philosophy and animal life (2008). humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 13 nonetheless, the emphasis on the decentralized human’s relational nature helps identify a line of demarcation between posthumanism and transhumanism. in wolfe words, posthumanism distances itself from the transhumanism “most decisively by reconceiving the relationship between what we call ‘the human’ and the question of finitude” (wolfe 2019 358). whereas transhumanism remains substantially anthropocentric in imagining future immortality for the robotic human beings, posthumanism points to the finitude of the species and the relationships and material entanglements that make the human possible. the notion of finitude is essential to understand this form of relational and environmental posthumanism that is not interested in defining what comes before or after humanism but invested in realizing human vulnerability and dependence on the environment and other species. in this perspective, the human is “a prosthetic creature that has coevolved with various forms of technicity and materiality, forms that are radically ‘nothuman’ and yet have nevertheless made the human what it is.” what makes humans prosthetic creatures is above all their language, which “is fundamental to our embodied enaction, our bringing forth a world, as humans.” in turn, this prostheticity is what creates humans’ “constitutive dependency and finitude” (wolfe 2011, xxv-xxvi). from this viewpoint, for posthumanism the prosthetic character of the human being has always existed as part of human symbiosis with technology and finitude. on the contrary, transhumanism instead insists on new and unprecedented human enhancement technologies to generate a genuinely new posthuman being. indeed, the transhumanist leader bostrom writes about “posthuman dignity” and holds that “it is possible that all the enhancements envisioned by transhumanists may make us, or our descendants, ‘posthuman’” (bostrom 2005, 203). in this perspective, the cyborg and the robot represent the core of the transhumanist project of empowering human bodies through their fusion with machines. it is worth mentioning that manfred clynes and nathan kline in the early 1960s conceived the cyborg as an attempt to redesign human bodies to meet the needs of space travel and become adequate to the stars. the term “cyborg” (cybernetic organism or cybernetically controlled organism) precisely suggested merging humans and machines. the new being, which was first tested on a mouse had to be born from the combination of cybernetics and computational approaches. the goal was to create a human-machine hybrid that through technological systems and electronic devices, would become able to automatically regulate essential human physiological functions in ways suitable for an alien environment such as space.17 clynes and kline conceived the cyborg as a transhuman creature; yet andy clark in his natural-born cyborgs (2003) questions their vision, pointing to the danger of the mistake implicit in a-critically defining an entity as transhuman or posthuman when, after all, it is born from human itself. he holds that humans are “cyborgs not in the merely superficial sense of combining flesh and wires but in the more profound sense of being human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and nonbiological circuitry.” in other words, human ability to become cyborgs “does not depend on physical wire-and-implant mergers, so much as on our openness to information-processing mergers.” many of human “tools” such as speech are not just external aids, but they are integral parts of the problem-solving systems of our minds which are special precisely because they are tailormade for multiple mergers and coalitions. in this sense, “the mind is just less and less in the head.” cognitive hybridization is as old as human speech and should not be considered a modern development.18 in this perspective, the “cognitive 17 manfred clynes and nathan kline’s article “cyborgs and space,” first appeared on astronautics, in september 1960. 18 in this sense, the main feature of a supposedly posthuman creature has its fundamental premises in the creation of the human world as described by giambattista vico. to become human for vico means, first, to create an extension of the human body through naming and the voice. it is possible to consider the human voice and the humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 14 fossil trail” of the cyborg includes “speech, counting, morphs first into written and numerals, then into early printing” and most recently the “digital encoding that bring text, sound, and image into uniform and widely transmissible format” (4-7). from the 1960s to today the cyborg has gone through a long evolution with developments in different directions.19 what interests me here is to briefly highlight the next step that took place in the following decades, which continues today and sees at its center not only the cyborg but also the robot. for sherry turkle, robots are “evocative objects” (68) that perform an increasing role in our daily life, from children’s play companions to babysitters and nursing home attendants. she studied above all sociable robots for children and seniors. still, her research findings bear a broader value for our digital networked culture and society more and more detached from face-to-face relationships and real life. in her alone together (2011), she emphasizes that we live in a “robotic moment” as we expect more from technology and less from each other. we bend to objects and what is inanimate in a new way as we become convinced that robots can perform better than humans: as sociable robots propose themselves as substitutes for people, new networked devices offer us machine-mediated relationships with each other, another kind of substitution. we romance the robot and become inseparable from our smartphones. as this happens, we remake ourselves and our relationships with each other through our new intimacy with machines.” (3) in so doing, she argues, we become more and more lonely, or “alone, together” in our networked life.20 more than revealing people’s willingness to interact with artificial intelligence and robots, turkle's research showed their reluctance to interact with other people. indeed, in a relationship with robots we look for performance of connections that we fear or do not want to realize with humans. turkle sees the “robotic moment” as a symptom and as a dream: “like all psychological symptoms, it obscures a problem by ‘solving’ it without addressing it” and “as dream, robots reveal our wish for relationships we can control” (283). the problem is not the technology we increasingly depend on, but the fact that we think it can solve all our difficulties and are unwilling to consider the costs we pay for our dependence and compulsion. it is no coincidence that today there is a substantial increase in studies that aim to understand the different facets of human-robot interaction (hri) and that “robophilosophy” was born, which is dedicated to investigating the original naming as the first, rudimentary, and ‘wild’ form of what we see nowadays as algorithms, finite sequences of logic instructions, and procedures for problem-solving and data processing (sini 5). on this topic, see my essay “vico wilderness and the places of humanity” (2011). 19 the bibliography on the subject is extensive. see chris hables gray’s cyborg citizen (2000) for a good introduction and overview. for the gender aspects of cyborg culture and politics, see the volume edited by fiona hovenden, et al., the gendered cyborg (2013). the latter book includes the groundbreaking “cyborg manifesto” (50-57) by donna haraway published initially in 1985. haraway and feminist thinkers interpret the cyborg and the posthuman as liberation of the body and subjectivity from masculine power and anthropocentric humanist culture. for an interpretation that excludes the “liberating” dimension of the cyborg and sees it instead as a confirmation of the traditional concepts of metaphysics, see francesco paolo adorno “al di là delle utopie, il transumanesimo” (2014 253-254). 20 the most recent essay by noreena hertz, the lonely century (2021), confirms turkle’s analysis. hertz considers loneliness the most urgent social issue of our time. she writes: “this lonely century presents us with unique challenges –economic, political, social and technological. it is a time when huge swathes of the population feel alone despite it never having been easier to connect; an age in which we identify increasingly on the basis of difference, yet are ever more aware of how intertwined our lives are with others across the globe; a time in which our local communities desperately need strengthening and the bridges that join different communities together very often still need to be built” (331-332). humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 15 reconfiguration of philosophy in the face of artificial social agency. david gunkel, in his the machine question (2012), asks precisely whether and to what extent intelligent and autonomous machines of our own making can be considered to have legitimate moral responsibilities and claims to moral consideration. grundel argues that the answer to the question about the moral state of the machine cannot be a “yes” or a “no.” however, the issue is becoming crucial in our time. and it is increasingly evident that it needs to be addressed because the technological changes in every aspect of our lives and professions put into question old ethical codes and bring about unanticipated problems for which there are no rules or policies at hand. indeed, transhumanism and robotics provoke enthusiasm about their great realizations and multiple concerns about the possible negative consequences of the hubris implicit in ai – for example, in warfare. as we saw earlier, carl schmitt, at the end of his analysis in land and sea, supported the possibility and necessity of finding adequate norms for the new spatial and temporal frontiers of the human. indeed, the emergence and perception of these problems have brought out many ethical and legal reflections that are a symptom of the unprecedented nature of what we are experiencing.21 the most significant motif of concern is related to the existing autonomous weapons systems (aws) that may be defined as “robotic weapons that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further human intervention” (heyns 4). drones first replaced humans’ physical presence on the battlefield; now they even replace their psychological presence, which means that computers can now determine when and against whom force is released. aws are “weapon platforms,” and in this sense, any weapon can, in principle, be fitted onto an aws. the use of these platforms and of remotecontrolled weapons in general, is motivated by the argument that they “may be quicker at engaging intended targets because they can process information faster” and better than humans. their “superior processing powers” are supposed to prevent the wrong targets from being hit, but this is not always the case;22 therefore “there are serious questions to be asked on the use of aws” from an ethical and legal point of view (heyns 67). this is largely because the international humanitarian law that regulates human rights during armed conflict has now to face the unprecedented situation in which those deciding to use force may not be humans. the main concern is that the machine embodied in the aws becomes endowed with such autonomy to supersede human independence entirely. the new accountability scenario includes the case in which “aws allow for, and are under, human control” and the opposite case in which “aws are outside human control”. in the first case, humans will remain responsible. still, in the second case, there may be an “accountability vacuum.” the point is that there is no agreement on what constitutes the “meaningful human control” that would legitimize the use of aws: “if there is no such control, there is a strong case to be made that such weapons and their use should be prohibited” (heyns 13). more generally, it is difficult if not impossible to find a satisfactory agreement between the various nationstates on limiting the dangerous effects of ai.23 in their recent study in the global landscape of ai ethics 21 for a recent, very comprehensive approach that is not exclusively eurocentric see dubber markus, et al. oxford handbook of ethics of ai (2020). see in particular judith donath’s “ethical issues in our relationship with artificial entities” (53-76), and matthew le bui and safiya umoja noble’s “we’re missing a moral framework of justice in artificial intelligence: on the limits, failings, and ethics of fairness” (163-180). 22 on december 18, 2021, the new york times describes the impressive human toll of the war fought by the us against syria and iraq, citing cases drawn from a hidden pentagon archive of the american air war in the middle east since 2014. it was supposed to be a war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs, but the documents show “flawed intelligence, faulty targeting, years of civilian deaths and scant accountability” (khan). 23 in december 2021, as i write this essay, the un is looking in vain for an agreement on killer drones in geneva. at the same time, even more futuristic disconcerting systems appear on the scene of the multiple wars of our time: weapons to control the mind. it is not just about out-of-control robotic weapons. these days, i read humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 16 guidelines (2019), anna jobin, marcello ienca and effy vayena write that “despite an apparent agreement that ai should be ‘ethical’, there is debate about both what constitutes a proper ethics to this field and which ethical requirements, technical standards and best practices are needed for its realization.” they mapped and analyzed the current corpus of principles and guidelines on ethical ai and found “a global convergence emerging around five ethical principles (transparency, justice and fairness, non-maleficence, responsibility and privacy).” however, they also found “substantive divergence in relation to how these principles are interpreted, why they are deemed important, what issue, domain or actors they pertain to, and how they should be implemented” (jobin et al. 389). the real problem is not so much or only finding adequate rules for the new technological realities, which remains essential. more so, it is first necessary to reflect on the very nature of ethics in the new technological and space revolution era. luciano floridi suggested in this regard the prospect of an “information ethics” (ie) to be considered as a foundational philosophical counterpart of computer ethics (ce), a special kind of “environmental” ethics or ethics of the “infosphere” (floridi 1999, 37). he argues that ce does have something distinctive and substantial to say on moral problems and hence can contribute a new and interesting perspective to the ethical discourse. in the next section, i will analyze in-depth his non-anthropocentric approach to ce and ie along with david gunkel’s enquiry on the machine question to understand some of the main theoretical issues of ethics in the age of ai. the ethical perspectives that i am about to analyze have a theoretical and methodological value that tries to deal with the profound crisis of traditional moral conceptions in the face of the problems of ai and technological innovation problems. in the concluding part of the section, i will reflect further on the relationship between humanism, transhumanism, and posthumanism and the reasons that lead me to consider the problem of conscience with a more-than-human perspective. ethical perspectives for floridi, the ethical theories born in the ancient world, partly taken up and modified by christianity and modern philosophies like utilitarianism, contractualism, and deontologism, are no longer apt to face the problems posed by recent technological developments. on the one hand, these classic or “standard” ethical theories are anthropocentric, subjectivist, and action-oriented; they concentrate on the moral nature and value of the actions performed by the agent. on the other hand, allocentric theories, such as medical ethics, bioethics, land and environmental ethics, are not action-oriented. these theories focus on patient-oriented ethics. and the receiver of the action (patient) maybe not only a human being, but also any form of life, “not just fetuses, new-born babies and senile persons, but above all physically or mentally ill, disabled or disadvantaged people” (42). nonetheless, floridi argues that the actual patient-oriented ethical theories are not universal enough; indeed, he proposes to develop ce into the broader concept of “information ethics.” in this perspective, ce opens ethical consideration not only to all forms of life comprised in the biosphere but “raises information as such, rather than just life in general, to the role of the true and universal patient of any action.” in so doing, ce presents itself as an “infocentric and object-oriented” rather than just a biocentric and patient-oriented ethics. in other words, the ce extends the territory of ethics to what is inanimate, lifeless, or simply possible as an artifact or technological product excluded from bioethics and environmental ethics (43). on repubblica about invisible rays capable of conditioning the mind and drones that obey human thought without the need for commands and then carry out murderous missions autonomously. according to the un, in the spring of 2021, a turkish remote-controlled plane conducted a raid in libya, choosing the target and deciding when to kill (di feo). humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 17 floridi’s information ethics is object-oriented and open to anything that exists; it is primarily an ethics of being rather than conduct or becoming and should be considered as “non-standard ethics.” the foundation of ie stems from what floridi calls “ontological equality principle” which means that “any form of reality (any instance of information), simply for the fact of being what it is, enjoys an initial, overridable, equal right to exist and develop in a way which is appropriate to its nature.” from this point of view, an agent is “any entity capable of producing information phenomena that can affect the infosphere” (44). however, not all information entities are agents because “many agents may often fail to be in a position to affect the infosphere significantly beyond their mere presence (think of a grain of sand in the desert or as the last grain flowing through an hourglass determining the explosion of a bomb).” moreover, “not all agents are responsible agents (e.g., a river or a dog)”. in the infosphere, which is the “environment constituted by the totality of information entities – including all agents processes, their proprieties and mutual relations,” an anthropocentric approach still make sense if the goal of the ethical discourse is to “persuade and motivate a person to act morally” (ibidem). nevertheless, ie can offer a “more objective” approach when the goal is to establish what is right or wrong not from the human point of view but from the point of view of all the entities involved in the information process and able to affect it. in other words, ie can provide a “disinterested judgement of the moral situation from an absolute perspective, i.e., a perspective which is as object-oriented as possible” (ibidem). whereas “biocentric ethics ground their analyses of the moral standing of bio-entities on the intrinsic worthiness of life,” ie’s infocentric approach is based on the ontological equality principle, which is assumed to be more elementary and fundamental than life and pain. in other words, floridi claims that ie’s is ethics of being, understood as information and entropy, and it can be achieved through the universal application of the golden rule in information terms. it is an ethics that looks after “the welfare of both the agent and the patient (‘care-fullness’)” and wants to implement choices and behaviors that are “as subject-oriented (agents’ selfinterest) as object-oriented (patient’s sake)” (floridi 45). furthermore, ie is not only able to dialogue with other macroethical systems but also to offer a new critical ethical perspective: “that a process or an action may be right or wrong irrespective of its consequences, motives, universality, or virtuous nature, but because it affects positively or negatively its patient and the infosphere.” floridi deduces that in practice today “without ie’s contribution, our understanding of moral facts in general, not just of ce-problems in particular, could not be fully satisfactory” (52). to support this claim and his theory of ie, floridi cites various examples, including privacy, a muchdebated problem in our highly-networked society. it is well known that we live in an ecosystem at the center of which are data producers and data collectors and data processors and data consumers who can recycle the data collected and then use them to make important decisions about the individuals to whom those data belong. the ever more real possibility of manipulating this data makes the question of informative privacy more and more urgent. ie puts “informational privacy” at the center of its reflections, which is instead neglected by action-oriented ethics. the latter anthropocentric form of ethics essentially rejects the transformation of individuals into a “packet of data” and claims for individuals the ownership and complete control of the data regarding them. ie instead shifts the ethical attention from individuals to the data concerning them to affirm that the data must be treated in their autonomy with the same regard and respect that we attribute to living individuals or environmental elements (ibidem). humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 18 floridi points out that the “person, the free and responsible agent in the infosphere” is, after all, a “packet of information” and “microenvironmental information.” in other words, a “constantly elastic and permeable entity with centers and peripheries but with boundaries that are neither clearly drawn nor rigidly fixed” (53). indeed, there is not the “selfhood” at the infosphere center but the “mehood.” the latter is a complex entity, an object, a bundle of information, and a “token-person.” in this perspective, privacy is nothing less than the “defense of the personal integrity of a packet of information.” thus, the violation of privacy is not a violation of ownership, of personal rights or of instrumental values “but a violation of the nature of information itself, an offence against the integrity of the me-hood” (ibidem). this approach deconstructs the human subject and transforms it into a data package that, in the information process, becomes endowed with moral personality regardless of the flesh-and-bone individual who, in a standard ethics perspective, would be the self, and the owner of those data. however, one should consider that if the ethical perspective delineated by floridi has value in the infosphere in identifying new moral personhood when it meets specific human, interhuman, interspecies, and human-machine relations, it remains subjected to political and economic decisions that are subservient to human – too human – interests. indeed, ie, as well as more-than-human ethics, conflicts with the traditional anthropocentric ethical conceptions based on the idea of the sovereignty of the individual over their data. as we know, this conflict has become crucial in our time and is at the center of some of the most urgent political and cultural debates.24 moreover, floridi’s ontocentric macroethics, which includes everything in the ethical discourse, runs into a methodological problem, as gunkel’s the machine question pointed out. gunkel argues that floridi’s “approach continues to deploy and support a strategy that is itself part and parcel of a totalizing, imperialist program” because notwithstanding the decentralizing intentions, it remains rooted in the human dimension (157). for gunkel, the posthuman approach should depose anthropocentrism and open up a more thoughtful and radical ethical consideration. for him, every “centrist” system, including the egocentric, anthropocentric, biocentric, and ecocentric ones, fails to recognize the other qua other and assimilates them within the logic of the human. centrist ethics “employ a strategy of totalizing comprehension, whereby whatever is other is reduced to some common denominator by progressively lowering the level of abstraction so that what had been different can come to be incorporated within the community of the same” (ibidem). gunkel points out this methodological impasse in floridi’s ie and the many approaches elucidated in the machine question that try to come to terms with the problem of agency and “patiency” in the age of ai. his analysis includes, among others, allan hanson’s “extended agencies” (a kind of “cyborg moral subject” where responsibility resides not in a predefined ethical individual but a network of relations situated between human individuals and others, including machines);25 and david f. channell’s “bionic ethics” or ethics in the age of the “vital machine” a dualistic mechanicalorganic system that is respectful of and takes responsibility for nonliving objects, not only soils, waters, and rocks but also computers and other technological artifacts. channel proposes to call this new holistic approach “cybernetic ecology” (gunkel 165-167).26 24 for an introduction to the ethical, social, political, and legal implications of the changes taking place for data generation, data integration, and data use, see rob kitchin the data revolution (2014). he writes that “it is clear that while such practices have benefits for governments, companies, and citizens, they also have differential and negative consequences” (183). for the complexity of privacy in these new circumstances, the pitfalls of existing legislation, and the difference between the american and european approaches see pp.168-175. 25 hanson insists on the notion of “joint responsibility” that in his view “is more conducive than moral individualism to constructive engagement with other people, with technology, and with the environment in general” (hanson 98). 26 channell’s ethic is inspired by aldo leopold’s “land ethic” that he wants to expand to include technological humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 19 despite their non-anthropocentric and universalist claims, all these theories are just different ways of articulating, preserving, and protecting human interests and assets and reducing the otherness of the nonhuman to the sameness of the human. to avoid the stalemate in which all the ethical theories examined so far fall, gunkel proposes the alternative embodied by levinas’s ethics, which invites us to think otherwise than being or beyond essence (1974). this proposal is a turning point in gunkel's essay. the most important and original aspect of levinas’s approach is to consider ethics as the “first philosophy,” while the ethical theor ies examined so far as ethics of being appeared to be oriented in an ontological or epistemological sense. i share with gunkel this interest and, in some respects, enthusiasm for levinas’s ethics, even if, as i will show in the following pages, my reading at some points differs from his. the alterity of the other is so radical for levinas that it exceeds any representation or thematization. therefore, ethical relationships are neither agent-oriented nor patient-oriented but rather based on an absolute call that is perceived before being expressed. it is a kind of “speech which does not speak,” a kind of discourse which comes before any address, as it is a “pre-original saying” which escapes the rigidity of essence and ontology present in the said – the actual language. it is an absolute obedience to a call which comes before any command. “no one is good voluntarily” and “no one is a slave of the good,” writes levinas in otherwise than being (levinas 1998, 138). the good has no other and cannot be present or enter into a representation or be the result of an active choice made by the human subject who is called to transcend the ego: “the good chooses me before i welcome it” (levinas 1998, 123). the model for this ethical relationship is the prophet isaiah who, after hearing the voice of the lord saying, “whom shall i send, and who will go for us?” answered: “i, here i am” (is. 6,8). in that “here i am,” in that absolute responsibility toward the other, levinas sees the silent revelation, the testimony made possible by listening to the secret self which lives inside every human being, undercover in each ego, and which can be considered the voice of conscience not understood in subjectivist term.27 levinas’ ethics, therefore, has primarily a methodological value intended to capture the essence of the ethical relationship and does not want to express itself through moral rules or laws. gunkel appreciates above all the fact that this ethics “is not predicated on an a priori ontological determination of personhood” which is instead first determined “on the basis of and as a product of the ethical relationship” (179). however, he is puzzled by the “residue of humanism” he detects in levinas’ philosophy which after all remains an humanisme de l’autre homme (1972) as the title of one of his book states. the english translation of this work, humanism of the other, obscures this human dimension, but it remains unequivocal that when levinas speaks of the ethical factor based on the epiphany of the face of the other, he above all has a human relationship in mind. let’s not forget that for levinas the human face, the face of the other human being in need, is a trace of the divine that emerges in the face-to-face encounter with the other: “the dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face ... it is here that the transcendent, infinitely other, solicits us and appeals to us” (levinas, 1979: 78). in this perspective, it is clear that the fundamental source and “prototype” of ethics in levinas’ phenomenological account of the “face-to-face” encounter is limited to the human and interhuman realm. in artifacts. channel argues that “treating the relationship between the organic and the mechanical as a dualistic system, the ethical framework of the bionic worldview must reject as its basis the concepts of autonomous individual and a morally neutral technological world, but must instead be founded on the symbiotic interactions that exist between technology and organic life” (channell 151). 27 “responsibility in fact is not a simple attribute of subjectivity, as if the latter already existed in itself, before the ethical relationship. subjectivity is not for itself; it is, once again, initially for another” (levinas 2011, 96-97). humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 20 other words, he holds that, in an ethical sense, other animals, the environment, and machines do not have “faces” and should not be considered as sources of ethics.28 for gunkel, the anthropological closure of this approach shows the limit of levinas’s ethics because if “as levinas argues, ethics precedes ontology, then in levinas ’s own work, anthropology and a certain brand of humanism appear to precede and underwrite ethics” (181). for this reason, gunkel points to the need to interpret levinas’s own philosophical innovations in excess of and in opposition to him. in this regard, he points to the work of scholars such as peter atterton and matthew calarco, who attempt at radicalizing levinas because “although levinas himself is for the most part unabashedly and dogmatically anthropocentric, the underlying logic of his thought permits no such anthropocentrism” (gunkel 182; calarco 2008, 55). indeed, calarco argues that “levinas’s ethical philosophy is, or at least should be, committed to a notion of universal ethical consideration” (ibid). even if he endorses these attempts at interpreting levinas’s philosophy in opposition to himself, gunkel concludes his analysis by noting that both levinas and calarco fail to include machines in their version of universal ethical consideration: machines, he writes “remain, for both levinas and calarco, otherwise than ethics, or beyond other” (gunkel 185). this conclusion is also confirmed from another point of view, by another scholar of levinas, richard cohen. cohen holds that the machine and the animal do not have a “face” and do not constitute an other. they are not capable of independent “moral sensitivity” necessary to enter into moral agency’s unitary and unifying solidarity. (grunkel 200; cohen 164165). by considering the machine a pure instrument of human interaction, cohen misunderstands the nature of cybernetics. gunkel, following wolfe, reads cybernetics in posthuman terms as the theory of communicational processes in which humans lose any form of privileged position (grunkel 201; wolfe 2011, xii). in this perspective, for gunkel cybernetics may be another way to articulate and address the “otherwise than being” approach of central concern in levinasian ethics by opening the ethical discourse to communication with previously excluded others (202). nonetheless, at the end of gunkel’s essay, the question of the machine – “are computers, ai’s robots, and other mechanisms a legitimate moral agent and/or patient, or not?”– remains unanswered in all its complexity.29 gunkel develops a critical inquiry that asks about the very limits and possibilities of moral thinking itself. in other words, “the machine question not only adds interesting new dimensions to old problems but leads us to rethink, methodologically, the very grounds on which our ethical positions are based” (211). gunkel sets aside any form of metaphysical certainty based on a “transcendental figure like god.” he embraces a posthuman stance based on some poststructuralist certitudes such as the death of god in nietzsche, the death of the author in barthes, and the eclipse of the human subject in heidegger and foucault. all things appear to be open to reconfiguration and reevaluation (214). nonetheless, this posthuman ethics is for gunkel, following putman, “about decision and not discovery” (gunkel, ibid.; putnam 691). indeed, at the end of his book gunkel repeats hilary’s putnam gesture at the end of his long paper on “robots: machines or artificially created life?” (1964). 28 see for example his interview with tamra wright, et al, “the paradox of morality: an interview with emmanuel levinas” (172). on this subject there is an extensive bibliography discussed by gunkel (179-189). i wrote briefly about levinas and the question of the animal in an essay on the editio princeps (inc. queriniano g v 15) of petrarca’s canzoniere. grifo, the author of the illuminations, shows how the early humanist culture was open to recognizing an agency to the environment and other animals (see lollini 2021, 134-136). 29 gunkel maintain this philosophical undecidability in regard to questions of ai personhood, in his most recent interventions including the debate with jordan joseph wales, where he concludes “the correct response to the questions of ai personhood, therefore, may not be a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’“ (gunkel 2021, 482). humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 21 after having analyzed in detail and with great rigor the arguments for and against considering robots conscious, putnam concludes that there is not the slightest reason for us, either, to believe that “consciousness” is a well-defined property, which each robot either has or lacks, but such that it is not possible, on the basis of the physical description of the robot, or even on the basis of the “psychological” description (…), to decide which (if any) of the robots possess this property and which (if any) fail to possess it (putnam 599; emphasis in the text). for this reason, the question about robots’ conscience calls for a decision and not for discovery: the decision, at the bottom, is this: do i treat robots “as fellow members of my linguistic community, or as machines?” (putnam 691). putnam argues that as long as this decision is not taken, the statement that robots are conscious has “no truth value.” thus, if we accept a physical and psychological description of robots without establishing a priori if they have a conscience, “we are not thereby forced to hold either that ‘consciousness’ is a ‘physical’ attribute or that it is an attribute ‘implicitly defined by a psychological theory’” (putnam 690). eventually, the human factor thrown out the window quietly re-enters the door as part of the “we” called to decide: “we, individually and in collaboration with each other (and not just those others who we assume are substantially like ourselves), decide who is and who is not part of the moral community — who, in effect, will have been admitted to and included in this first-person plural pronoun” (gunkel 215). this ethics of decision cannot give general answers to the question of the machine, which must instead always be addressed in specific situations and in the awareness of the informational processes in which messages between humans and machines, machines and humans, and machines and machines are strictly intertwined. therefore, gunkel concludes with rehabilitating the human on the decision level “we, and we alone, are responsible for determining the scope and boundaries of moral responsibility, for instituting these decisions in everyday practices, and for evaluating their results and outcomes” (215). i agree with gunkel when he stresses that despite the intertwining of responsibilities in the messages and collaborations between humans and machines in the infosphere, we humans alone, as humans, are fully responsible and accountable for decisions concerning the inclusiveness and practicability of moral sensitivity. in this sense, i argue that we have a special responsibility that cannot be confused with our co-agents and copatients be they robots, the environment, or other animals. once this has been established, however, it is necessary to recognize that thinking otherwise than being (levinas) and the reconfiguration of morality induced by the question of the machine should not go so far as not to take into account an idea of human consciousness. gunkel dismisses consciousness as a precondition of moral personhood, since it appears to be a very abstract and unqualified idea (90). i understand his point, but if we think of an idea of conscience not in ontological terms but precisely in ethical terms as levinas does in otherwise than being, we must think that our conscience is not established once and for all but rather develops in the relationships we entertain with other human beings, other animals, machines, things, the environment. only in the relationship with these ethical entities can our consciousness emerge. and these ethical entities acquire moral personhood at the moment in which they come to life along with our conscience. for this reason, i read levinas’s “epiphany of the face” in intersection with paul ricoeur’s idea of “oneself as another.” for levinas, the trace of the divine, the infinity, that manifests itself in the face of the other and exposes the human conscience to an absolute and unavoidable call capable of producing an absolute and ideal ethical relation. in otherwise than being, he holds that it is through “ambivalence which always remains an enigma that humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 22 infinity or the transcendent does not let itself be assembled.” indeed, the infinity that emerges in the ethical relationship is the “trace of its impossible incarnation and its inordinateness in my proximity with the neighbor, where i state, in the autonomy of the voice of conscience, a responsibility, which could not have begun in me, for freedom, which is not my freedom” (161; my emphasis). paul ricoeur sees a limit in this approach to the ethical relationship. for him, levinas reduces the otherness of consciousness to the otherness of other people, to the “externality of the other manifested in his face”: “in this sense, there is no other modality of otherness for levinas than this externality. the model of all otherness is the other person” (354). ricoeur argues that “if the injunction coming from the other is not part and parcel of self-attestation, it loses its character of injunction, for lack of the existence of a being-enjoined standing before it as its respondent.” for ricoeur the agent’s and patient’s dimension of the ethical relationship are intersected; he thinks that eliminating the extent of autoaffection, “one ultimately renders the metacategory of conscience superfluous; the category of the other suffices [at that point]” (355) at that point. levinas notion of otherness promotes this unilateral view, which implies that the injunction comes only from the other while the self supposedly remains completely passive. ricoeur argues that from the strictly philosophical point of view, the nature of the voice of conscience, the source of the call remains more equivocal than admitted by levinas. indeed, ricoeur writes, “the philosopher as philosopher has to admit that one does not know and cannot say whether this other, the source of the injunction, is another person whom i can look in the face or who can stare at me, or my ancestors for whom there is no representation (…), or god -–living god, absent god—or an empty place” (ricoeur, 1992: 355). however, the importance of the philosophical discourse does not stop with the recognition of this aporia. what matters for philosophy is the recognition of otherness as a constitutive part of consciousness and the identity of the human that loses its central position and recognizes its dependence on others. ricoeur’s notion of conscience, as discussed in the last chapter of oneself as another (341-355), while preserving the mystery and equivocal nature of the ethical relationship, is still able to speak to the complexity of the ethical challenges of our time without incurring into the pitfalls of materialist approaches that represent a large part of the posthuman discourse. john r. searle’s the mystery of consciousness contributes to clarifying this point. he criticizes the most common move in contemporary philosophy to insist that materialism must be right and that we must eliminate consciousness by reducing it to something else. he argues that all of these reductionist attempts to eliminate consciousness are hopeless as the dualism they were designed to supplant. in a way they are worse, because they deny the real existence of the conscious states they were supposed to explain. they end up by denying the obvious fact that we all have inner, qualitative, subjective states such as our pains and joys, memories and perceptions, thoughts and feelings, moods, regrets, and hungers (searle, 1997: xiii). he adds, “consciousness is a natural biological phenomenon that does not fit comfortably into either of the traditional categories of mental and physical” (searle xiv). in other words, for searle we need to abandon the traditional categories and start rejecting both dualism and materialism, and accept that “consciousness is both a qualitative, subjective ‘mental’ phenomenon, and at the same time a natural part of the ‘physical’ world” (ibidem). notwithstanding all the entanglements in which we are involved as agents and patients, we, and only we humans, can decide if and in what circumstances the area of conscience and moral sensitivity can be extended to machines. this is the special responsibility we have in our time. humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 23 the notion of “otherness” and “conscience” discussed above opens the way to a more-than-human humanism that decenters the privileged position of the human without pretending to be necessarily transhuman or posthuman in ontological terms. although i understand the reasons behind transhumanism and posthumanism discourses, i find them in a certain sense closed in delineating their ultimate ontological perspectives. this closure is especially true for transhumanism, which wants to strengthen the human to anticipate the creation of truly posthuman creatures and imagine a future without human beings. in doing so, transhumanism appears immersed in the present convulsive tendencies towards robotization without developing a substantive vision of the future. posthumanism instead starts from recognizing the loss of centrality of the human. still, it cannot and does not want to entirely do without the human, even if it tends to cancel the consciousness that appears immersed and sucked into the cybernetic transformations of the present. the notion of more-than-human humanism that i have in mind wants to keep alive the effort of thinking otherwise than being as open to humans, other animals, the environment, and the machine. at the same time, it maintains a critical notion of human conscience as a necessary feature of human responsibility that involves the present, the past, and the future. the time of the end? for more than two years, immersed in the covid-19 pandemic and its variants, we have lived in a suspended present in which all usual points of reference disappeared. the uncertainty in which we live makes plans unfeasible and impossible to project forward. furthermore, when we consider the future, we mostly perceive it as a threat to our lives, and this happens daily if we think, for example, in terms of global warming and climate change. the historian françois hartog argues that our “presentism” is not a recent experience. it has its roots in two parallel phenomena: the loss of the future, which is seen as a threat, and the past, which is increasingly idealized as a golden age of humanity. these two phenomena push us out of history, which can only occur if the past is evoked in the perspective of a future into which we think we should be heading. in his most recent book, chronos: l’ occident aux prises avec le temps (chronos: the west grappling with time; 2020), hartog reminds us that the time of the earth is counted in billions of years. he argues that with the anthroprocene we are faced with an immeasurable time scale compared to that of kronos, which usually counts in centuries or at least in thousands of years. in this situation, we are faced with an unlimited past and an unlimited future. moreover, the future is fully indeterminate, out of touch with the past, and bearer of great threats. while today we are becoming aware of this disconcerting idea of the future, we continue to live in the impression that science and technological progress can save us immediately in the present. this attitude has prevailed even in the face of the dangers of covid-19 which have been addressed only on a technical level, proposing a rapid techno-fix, refusing to reflect and work seriously on their causes, rooted in a distorted and unscientific relationship with the ecosystem.30 however, the actual challenges of the anthropocene recover a sense of limit, as happened more than two thousand years ago with the advent of christian temporality. the first part of the chronos: l’ occident aux prises avec le temps is dedicated to the study of the christian sense of time, which became dominant in western civilization starting from the fall of the roman empire up to the eighteenth century and conceived as “the time of the end.” as hartog explains, the early christian world used three concepts of ancient greek culture to define time: on the one hand, kronos, the passing of time, the time of life, and the seasons; on the other hand, kairos, the right, critical and favorable moment, the opportunity that 30 see giuseppe longo, “la pandémie et le ‘techno-fix’ (2021). https://blogs.mediapart.fr/les-amis-de-la-generation-thunberg/blog/051121/giuseppe-longo-la-pandemie-et-le-techno-fix humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 24 should be taken; and finally, krisis, which, especially in the medical field, indicates the critical moment, decisive in one sense or another. kairos comes to designate the incarnation in the christian world, which is considered the most crucial moment of human time. so much so that early christians started devaluing the relationship with chronos; christ represents the kairos par excellence, the beginning of a new time that will continue until the end of time, the moment of krisis, of the final judgment preceded by the apocalypse. the christian time of the origins is inscribed within these two limits: kairos, the incarnation, and krisis, the final judgment. the time that elapses between the two limits, kairos and krisis, does not count for the christians. it is a kind of present without substance characterized by the expectation of the end of time (hartog 2020, 23-74).31 in the last part of chronos: l’ occident aux prises avec le temps, which is entitled l’anthropocène et l’histoire, hartog argues that the anthropocene recovers a sense of limit, as in the times of christian temporality. the climatic threat introduces the possibility of the end of the human world and the realization that the earth may continue to exist without humans. for hartog, humans are therefore forced to deal with a new “time of the end” and the apocalyptic schemes of the past (hartog 2020, 309-319). the new perception of time in which we live finds new stimuli in the revolution of late modernity that projects humans into space and the infosphere. thus, oblivion of the earth emerges in our lives, which is at the origin of contemporary disorientation. land and sea by carl schmitt, which we analyzed in the first section of this essay, reminds us of the terrestrial roots of human beings and their legal and political systems. schmitt matured his ideas in dialogue with ernst jünger, who in his an der zeitmauer (at the wall of time; 1959) argued the need to relocate the history of humans in its geological dimension. in this perspective, the history of humans was nothing more than a chapter in the history of the earth. for this reason, jünger chose to title the journal antaios (antaeus), founded in 1971, in the name of the giant son of poseidon and gaia. antaeus remains invincible only if his feet are well placed on the earth, on his mother gaia. he is destined to ruin when lifted from the ground (volpi 115-116). the rehabilitation of the earth found in schmitt and jünger can be a guide in the attempt to rediscover a historical sense in the current dimension of time, which tends to take on apocalyptic tones. this rehabilitation appears to be the necessary premise to re-establish a link with the past and take the first steps towards a sustainable future. earth scientists and biologists inform us that we are entering an era of mass extinction and that well more than half of the species on the earth will soon become extinct.32 the severity of the ongoing extinction and the overall reduction of the earth’s resources endanger the survival of the human species itself. in the sixth extinction: patterns of life and the future of humankind (1996), kenyan paleoanthropologist richard leakey, one of the world’s foremost experts on human evolutionary past, argues that it is our past, as a species, that can guide us into the future, facing the prospect an unprecedented new extinction. on five occasions in the past, catastrophic natural events have caused mass extinctions but today, humans themselves possess the ability to destroy entire species at will, to trigger the sixth extinction in the history of life. leakey insists on the idea of change or metamorphosis that was also central in the ancient world. based on this principle, we recognize that “humans are but a brief moment in a continuous flow of life, not its endpoint.” what is most important then is to recognize that “it is in the patterns within the change that we find the nature of life’s flow; the patterns are 31 an interesting study of the temporal conceptions of the early christians can be seen in the recent book by giancarlo gaeta, significantly entitled il tempo della fine (the time of the end; 2020). 32 for an introduction to the problem see elizabeth kolbert, the sixth extinction: an unnatural history (2014). she argues that the sixth extinction is likely to be humanity’s most lasting legacy, compelling us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human. humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 25 the surface signals of the fundamental processes that nurture that flow.” by “patterns,” he means “the images that emerge when we scrutinize the fossil record in its entirety (…) the images that emerge when we scrutinize ecological communities as a whole” (5-6). in other words, the nature of the world we live in and the meaning of life on earth cannot be found in the fossils of individual species in the geological record but the relationship among species. this co-dependence is proper and meaningful if we think of the past, the present, and the future – and this non-anthropocentric view confirms humans’ special responsibility and entanglement with a unique ecosystem that cannot be neglected. faced with the prospect of a sixth extinction, transhumanism proposes to encourage new and advanced anthropocentrism and technological activity to attempt an escape into the space where humans are destined to disappear in known forms. on the other hand, posthumanism recognizes the limits of anthropocentrism and its dependence on the ecosystem. but it can be said, as yuval noah harari does in his homo deus: a brief history of tomorrow (2016), that our “time of the end” is characterized by new forms of technological religiosity. he points to “dataism” the techno-religion that “venerates neither gods nor man – it worships data” (502). it is not by chance that the dataist prophets in silicon valley consciously use traditional messianic language. harari mentions that ray kurzweil’s book the singularity is near, echoes john the baptist’s cry: “the kingdom of heaven is near” (matthew 3:2). indeed, “as the global data-processing system becomes all-knowing and all-powerful, so connecting to the system becomes the source of all meaning” including the spiritual, economic, medical, and biographical aspects of our lives.33 all we need to do is “record and connect our experience to the great data flow, and the algorithms will discover its meaning and tell us what to do” (528-529). however, in chapter three and the conclusion of his book, harari questions whether life can be reduced to data flows and holds that we have no idea how or why data flows could produce consciousness and subjective experiences. given that in dataism, intelligence is decoupled from consciousness, he asks two fundamental questions: on the one hand, “what will happen to society, politics, and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?” and, on the other hand, “what’s more valuable – intelligence or consciousness?” (544). it is becoming increasingly apparent and even obvious that technological hubris and environmental destruction have brought into question the notion of humanity as we have known it up to the twentieth century. just as it is evident that the progress of society and the world economy is by no means a guarantee for a bright future ahead of us, precisely for this reason, there is a need for an active reconnection to the human to its geological and historical roots. in other words –as bill mckibben writes in contrast to the dark title of his book falter: has the human game begun to play itself out? – there is a need for a note of hope. he wants to clarify that he lives in a state of engagement, not despair. indeed, he has immersed himself in movements working for change and helped to create a group, 350.org, that grew into the first planetwide climate campaign (6-8). certainly, awareness of the current challenges of technology can and must express itself in different forms of resistance to the adverse effects of artificial intelligence in our lives. the ethical approach to the issues raised by the pervasiveness of machines and ai in human life is undoubtedly essential. nevertheless, however sophisticated it may be, moral universalism is not enough to address these questions. in her recent atlas of ai (2021), kate crawford argues that ai’s triumphal narration based on algorithmic exceptionalism deemed 33 we turn to the web and social media also to process mourning and its meaning. up to the point that we talk about the possibility of a second life in virtual reality. advances in data mining and artificial intelligence are now making an active presence after death possible, and the dead remain part of our lives as they live on in our digital devices. see savin-baden, maggi, and victoria mason-robbie (2020), and davide sisto (2018). humanist studies & the digital age lollini 7.1 2022 26 more intelligent and more objective than flawed human creators must be negotiated and contrasted above all on the political level. she writes: artificial intelligence is not an objective, universal, or neutral computational technique that makes determinations without human direction. its systems are embedded in social, political, cultural, and economic worlds, shaped by humans, institutions, and imperatives that determine what they do and how they do it. (211) this political insight has a profound impact on the very notion of ethical universalism as ai systems “are designed to discriminate, to amplify hierarchies.” when applied in social contexts such as policing, the court system, health care, and education, “they can reproduce, optimize, and amplify existing structural inequalities.” for crawford, this is no accident: ai systems “are built to see and intervene in the world in ways that primarily benefit the states, institutions, and corporations that they serve” (212). i argue that the political approach and the search for justice and equality should not be disjointed from a rigorous ethical process based on human consciousness. perhaps, it is no longer the time for on-a-volcano meditations immersed as we are in the hyperobjects that are penetrating our consciousness. however, it is still undoubtedly appropriate to insert human history in the infinite time of the earth, as leopardi did in the nineteenth century by writing la ginestra, or il fiore del deserto (1836). the central point of that meditation, the appeal to humanity to find unity of purpose not in the mirages of progress but in resistance to the time of the end, it is still valuable.34 works cited adorno, francesco paolo. “al di là delle utopie, il transumanesimo.” umanesimo: storia, critica, attualità. eds. m. russo, s. toussaint. firenze: le lettere, 2015. 237-254. print arendt, hannah. between past and future: six exercises in political thought. new york, ny: meridian books, 1954. print. atterton, peter, and matthew calarco. eds. radicalizing levinas. albany, ny: suny press, 2010. print. bennett, jane. vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. durham: duke university press, 2010. print. braidotti, rosi, and maria hlavajova. eds. posthuman glossary. london: bloomsbury academic, 2020. print. bridle, james. new dark age: technology and the end of the future. london: verso, 2018. print. cacciari, massimo. la mente inquieta: saggio sull'umanesimo. torino: einaudi, 2019. print. calarco, matthew. zoographies: the question of the animal from heidegger to derrida. new york: columbia university press, 2008. print. cesaroni, pierpaolo. “‘pensare nel vuoto dell'uomo scomparso.’ l’antiumanismo nella filosofia francese contemporanea.” umanesimo: storia, critica, attualità. eds. m. russo, s. toussaint. firenze: le lettere, 2015. 215-236. print. 34 at the core of leopardi’s meditation there were lines 118-123: “… tutti fra sé confederati estima /gli uomini, e tutti abbraccia / con vero amor, porgendo / valida e pronta ed aspettando aita / negli alterni perigli e nelle angosce / della guerra comune. 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artificial intelligence christina linardaki abstract: this paper is about artificial intelligence (ai) attempts at writing poetry, usually referred to with the term “poetry generation”. poetry generation started in the digital humanities, which developed out of humanities computing; nowadays, however, it is part of computational creativity, a field that tackles several areas of art and science. no matter which field is undertaking the venture of poetry generation, it is certainly a fascinating process, as it essentially involves a reinvention of how the human brain works. moreover, if the vision is to arrive at a novel form or idiom of poetry, the product can be altogether refreshing. but so far, ai attempts at poetry generation are not so different from equivalent human attempts based on algorithmic processes. this means that, in a way, ai attempts have dovetailed with poetry’s long tradition as an art form in evolution. in the paper, it is first examined why poetry was chosen among other literary genres as a field for experimentation. mention is made to the characteristics of poetry (namely arbitrariness and absurdity) that make it fertile ground for such endeavors and also to various textand reader-centered literary approaches that favored experimentation even by human poets. then, a rough historic look at poetry generation is attempted. this is followed by a review of the methods employed — either for fun or as academic projects — along lamb et al.’s taxonomy (“a taxonomy of generative poetry techniques”), which distinguishes between mere poetry generation and result enhancement. another taxonomy by gonçalo oliveira (“a survey on intelligent poetry generation: languages, features, techniques, reutilisation and evaluation”), dividing between form and content issues in poetry generation, is also briefly presented. the results of poetry generators are evaluated against manurung’s (an evolutionary algorithm approach to poetry generation) three preconditions for successful ai-generated poems: (i) grammaticality, (ii) meaningfulness, and (iii) poeticness. the reasons for any poorness occurring are also looked into: the inability of computers to understand words as signs with a signified, a lack of general intelligence, process(rather than output-) driven attempts, etc. then, computer-like results (algorithmic processes) from a number of human poetic movements are also presented as a juxtaposition: dada, stream of consciousness, oulipo, langpo, flarf, and blackout/erasure poetry. a remarkable similarity is found to surface between (i) human poets who are more concerned with experimentation than quality of results, and (ii) computer scientists who are processrather than outcome-driven. this leads to a discussion of the characteristics of humanness, the possibility of granting future ai personhood, and the need to see our world in terms of a new and more refined ontology. http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ humanist studies & the digital age linardaki 7.1 2022 2 introduction attempts at poetry generation using artificial intelligence (ai) started as early as 1959, but it was already in the 1940s that humanities computing had given rise to digital humanities. digital humanties (dh) was (and is) a field that applies automation processes to texts, and this included attempts at poetry generation, without however ever making this its main goal. it was only after the turn of the millennium that computer science started seeing poetry generation as fertile ground for ai experimentation within the scope of computational creativity, a field that tackles several areas of art (such as prose, music, painting, song lyrics, photobashing, etc.) and science. if digital humanities’ attempts at poetry generation were restricted to rearranging or otherwise mixing human-written poems to produce something different, the question now with computer science was how to arrive at “intelligent” ways of generating poems rather than ruminating pieces of existing ones. to achieve this, complex and often knowledge-intensive systems that involved several computational and linguistic layers were employed. creators of poetry generators today are less focused on the output; they are rather focused on the process of generation per se, a process that involves the teaching of ai to perform desired tasks. thus, the potential contribution of humanities was rather disregarded and jostled altogether. various attempts at poetry generation, either for fun or as academic projects, can be enlightening with regard to understanding the complex computational processes involved. but first, we will tackle the question of why poetry was chosen over other literary genres. why poetry in the first place? why did the creators of poetry generators choose poetry over another creative writing form, e.g. bonsai short stories (with a typical ceiling of around 600 words)? the answer lies in the characteristics of poetry relative to other literary genres. a short story, however small, must have a structure — characters, dialogues, plot, and so on. poetry, on the other hand, incorporates a degree of arbitrariness since there are no strict or universal rules for what is acceptable or not. it also incorporates a degree of absurdity, as many a time it not only resists commonly acceptable meaning, but also reverses it. despite being considered one of the most difficult literary genres to grasp due to its multitude of language levels (vocabulary, grammar, syntax, semantics, phonemics, metrics, figures of speech, etc.), poetry does not necessitate the use of all of them at the same time. in other words, it is not mandatory for all these elements to be present in a single poem, and this has certainly been noticed by computer scientists. manurung (an evolutionary algorithm approach to poetry generation), for example, has noted that writing poetic text does not have to be extremely precise, as several rules of language that hold in the generation of natural language can be broken in poetry. the above characteristics theoretically make poetry more fertile ground for experimentation than any other literary genre. this is not only the case with ai; personal experience in literary criticism has shown that many new and ambitious human writers start off with poetry because they consider it more convenient and easier, and as a consequence, they usually begin by writing mediocre poems. why should we expect any different from ai? notwithstanding the above, there is also another reason to choose poetry as a field for experimentation: textand reader-centered literary approaches have turned the headlights away from the author. the spotlight has shifted to the text first and the reader next — bringing about the “death of the author” (barthes) and giving the reigns of determining the poem’s meaning to the other two. among text-centered approaches and schools humanist studies & the digital age linardaki 7.1 2022 3 in literary theory, there are notably the following: russian formalism (early 20th century), which looks for the meaning of a literary text in the mechanisms employed and its structural principles, i.e. the very qualities that make a text literary (medvedev and bakhtin); american new criticism (1930s and on), which looks into the way that poetry interacts with the semantics of language (richards; eliot); and structuralism (1970s), which focuses on the conventions that allow literature to exist (todorov). under such approaches, the literary text is seen as an autonomous entity, the understanding of which requires nothing apart from its very words. reader-centered approaches, on the other hand, include the following: semiotics (late 19th century), which supports that the meaning of a literary text arises from the interaction of the sign, the interpreter, and the event, and can change over time (culler); psychoanalytic criticism (1970s and on) which speaks of reading as a means of rebuilding the identity of the reader through a transactive relation that is established between him/her and the text (holland); reception aesthetics (rezeptionsästhetik, 1960s), which maintains that the past experiences embedded in a text merge with the interests, cultural stock, and personal experiences of the readers as they read (jauss); and reading response criticism (1970s), which talks of the ambiguity inherent in the text, creating gaps which the reader must bridge in order to arrive at an interpretation (iser). the autonomy of the text, coupled with the reign of the reader as the assigner of meaning to it, caused a multitude of experimentations in literature to emerge. and much like computer scientists who are fascinated by the process, several poetic movements favored experimentation over a result that would fit mainstream poetry standards, challenging even the idea of such standards. this point will be addressed further, after a review of ai poetry generation history, methods, and processes. the baby steps of poetry generation first attempts to develop poetry using computers are more than 60 years old. the first poetry generation program is considered to be theo lutz’s “stochastic texts” in 1959. the program ambitioned to write poemlike texts from scratch in the german language (lutz). a sample of such a “poem” is the following: nicht jeder blick ist nah und kein dorf ist spät. ein schloss ist frei und jeder bauer ist fern. jeder fremde ist fern. ein tag ist spät. jedes haus ist dunkel. ein auge ist tief. not every look is near. no village is late. a castle is free and every farmer is far. every stranger is far. a day is late. every house is dark. an eye is deep. (translation by helen maccormac, 2005) same as with every other sample in the paper, this sample is seen through the lens of manurung’s (an evolutionary algorithm approach to poetry generation) three preconditions for successful ai-generated poetry; manurung said that ai-generated poems should include language that ensures the three elements of (i) grammaticality, (ii) meaningfulness, and (iii) poeticness. according to these preconditions, it is obvious that the results of the “stochastic texts” may be grammatical, but they are otherwise poor in terms of meaning and even poorer in terms of poeticness. of course, one could argue that it was the first such attempt, after all. and perhaps it was remarkable to arrive even at such a result at the time. humanist studies & the digital age linardaki 7.1 2022 4 digital humanities vs computational creativity other early attempts at poetry generation mainly involved rearrangements or imaginative combinations of existing human-written poems. this was perhaps the result of the nature of the framework in which such poetry generation occurred: dh developed out of humanities computing (henrickson), which has origins dating back to the 1940s and 50s vis-à-vis the pioneering work of scholars such as roberto busa and josephine miles (stagnaro; wimmer). busa met thomas j. watson, the founder of ibm, in 1949 and convinced him to sponsor the index thomasticus project. the project involved a computer-generated concordance to thomas aquinas’s writings, and many people today still consider it to mark the onset of the field of computational linguistics. josephine miles, on the other hand, a poet and professor of english at berkeley, became project director of an abandoned index-card-based concordance to the poetical works of john dryden in the early 1950s. partnering with the electrical engineering department at berkeley and using their ibm tabulation machine, miles used automatic methods to complete the concordance. this was eventually published in 1957, around the time that busa circulated early drafts of his own concordance to aquinas’s writings (wimmer). following these pioneers, other scholars from the humanities began using mainframe computers to automate tasks like word-searching, sorting, and counting, which was much faster than processing information from texts manually. all of these tasks involved dh. dh also touched on attempts at poetry generation, although never as holistically and persistently as ai is doing today. a notable example of dh poetry generation was the french “atelier of literature assisted by maths and computers” (alamo). alamo sprang in 1981 out of a poetic movement of the time, the oulipo, which was an acronym of ouvroir de littérature potentielle, i.e. workshop for potential literature (oulipo; berkman). an illustrious attempt of the alamo includes the rimbaudelaires, in which the altered structure of a sonnet by rimbaud, acquired by cutting out nouns, verbs and adjectives, was filled in with words from baudelaire’s poems (laws). rimbaudelaires are a strange mixture, producing lines that echo 19th-century french poetry and rendering rather solid results in terms of both coherence and meaning. seen against manurung’s (an evolutionary algorithm approach to poetry generation) preconditions (once more: grammaticality, meaningfulness, and poeticness), we may say that rimbaudelaires are good in terms of grammaticality, but they lack coherence (thus meaningfulness) in the succession of ideas, even though there is an allure of poeticness. a good example of rimbaudelaires is the following (laws): le rêveur du bonheur c’est un lac de poitrine où passe une gamine embrassant librement aux anges des sommeils d’argent; où le plaisir de la caresse fine fuit: c’est un poudreux bonheur qui se rit de soleil which roughly translates into: the dreamer of happiness is a bosom lake where a youngster passes kissing freely the angels of sleeps silver; where the pleasure of the fine caress flees: it's a powdery happiness that laughs at the sun humanist studies & the digital age linardaki 7.1 2022 5 after the turn of the millennium, computer science started seeing the field of poetry generation as fertile ground for ai experimentation. a sound result was suddenly secondary in importance. the process was what mattered the most; how could ai arrive at “intelligent” ways of generating satisfactory poems? trying to answer these questions, ai experts put to work language generation systems. these were often knowledge-intensive and involving several layers of language, such as phonetics, diction, syntax and semantics (gonçalo oliveira, multilanguage extension and evaluation of a poetry generator), and several computational methods. the sad thing was that the role of humanities in the process was completely upended. this is probably due to “the cultural and historical divisions between artists, humanists, engineers, and scientists” (roque). it is sad, however, because humanists might tangibly help computer scientists keep a keener eye on the output of poetry generation as well as the input. online poetry generators for fun there are numerous sites that produce poetry online mainly for recreation as a game. some of them are poem generator (poem generator),1 language is a virus (“poetry”),2 fantasy name generators (for haiku) (“haiku generator”),3 acrostic poem generator (for acrostic poems) (acrostic poem generator),4 the genuine haiku generator (“the genuine haiku generator”),5 poem portraits (delvin),6 and verse by verse (verse by verse).7 other projects, such as poem creator, which mixes up shakespearean poems with hip hop songs, are available only as an ipad app. let’s see an example of google’s ai poetry:8 this was the only way. it was the only way. 1 this poem generator can generate many types of poems: free verse, haiku, rhyming couplets, sonnets, limericks etc. poems are based on keywords that the user provides. see https://www.poem-generator.org.uk/ all links in this paper were last accessed on 22.7.2021. 2 this site avails of a number of different poetry engines that include haiku and sonnets. it also avails of an interactive haiku generator that uses words which the user provides and are incorporated into templates created from famous haiku poems. see http://www.languageisavirus.com/poetry.php 3 a random haiku generator that respects the standard (as perceived in the west) 5-7-5 syllable structure of the haiku. it also contains a disclaimer: “due to the randomness of a generator not all results will make perfect sense from a grammatical and/or strictly linguistic point of view”. see https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/haikugenerator.php 4 generator of acrostic poems (i.e. poems that spell out a word down the left side of the poem, beginning a new line with each letter of the word). the generator uses the name that a user enters to generate the poem. see http://www.acrosticpoem.org/ 5 random pseudo haiku generator. using a java script application, this page automatically generates about 7.62e+39 different haiku poems which, however, are admitted to be loaded with “too many incompatible images”. as for the generation mechanism, on the “what is this?” pad on the site, it is stated that “there are no predefined sentence structures; no pre-packaged lines. the words themselves decide which type of word will follow, as randomly as possible, while still maintaining some semblance of adherence to grammar and readability.” see http://www.everypoet.com/haiku/ 6 google’s ai poetry generation project, undertaken with researchers at stanford and the university of massachusetts is “an experiment at the boundaries of ai and human collaboration”. users are asked to donate a word and become part of an ever-evolving collective poem. if they also allow use of their camera, they will receive a photo portrait of theirs accompanied by a two-verse poem. see https://artsexperiments.withgoogle.com/poemportraits 7 google’s ai poems inspired by famous american poets of the 19th century. the user selects a poet from a list and then designs the desired poem structure. then, s/he writes the first line and chooses the rest from a list of suggestions. see https://sites.research.google/versebyverse/ 8 more at: https://www.writerswrite.com/google-ai-writes-poetry-51920161 https://www.poem-generator.org.uk/ http://www.languageisavirus.com/poetry.php https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/haiku-generator.php https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/haiku-generator.php http://www.acrosticpoem.org/ http://www.everypoet.com/haiku/ https://artsexperiments.withgoogle.com/poemportraits https://sites.research.google/versebyverse/ https://www.writerswrite.com/google-ai-writes-poetry-51920161 humanist studies & the digital age linardaki 7.1 2022 6 it was her turn to blink. it was hard to tell. it was time to move on. he had to do it again. they all looked at each other. they all turned to look back. they both turned to face him. they both turned and walked away. judged against manurung’s preconditions (an evolutionary algorithm approach to poetry generation), we see that google is doing well with grammaticality, but not so much so with meaningfulness (there is little coherence and a significant amount of repetition that obscures meaning), let alone poeticness. like this one, most results from such online poetry generators are generally clumsy. additionally, they may require a generous donation of words or even chunks of speech from the user, according to what they would prefer to see in the generated poem. in the above example, “it was the only way” was the donated phrase. poetry generators as academic projects besides the fun of the absurdity (or the occasional random success) of online poetry generators like these previous ones, poetry generation has also been undertaken as part of meticulous academic projects. such projects used a variety of methods, much like poetry generators for fun have used, only in the academic framework, they have become more transparent. among early academic projects were poetryme (gonçalo oliveira, “po”tryme"),9 poevolve (levy),10 tra-la-lyrics 2.0 (gonçalo oliveira, “tra-la-lyrics 2.0”; gonçalo oliveira, et al., “text based on rhythm”), and aspera (gervás, “generating poetry from a prose text”). a more up-to-date joint project would be deep-spear,11 which produces lines like the following ones: that is the world art we a lord of god give in him, evermore to teach my prayers and only to forget her for its sake it is not love, for all thy flesh and peace. against manurung’s preconditions (an evolutionary algorithm approach to poetry generation), it is evident that with deep-spear, grammaticality is achieved (albeit with a middle english accent), but meaningfulness is not (certain phrases are simply nonsensical) and neither is poeticness. thus, the output is again rather poor. lamb et al. (“a taxonomy of generative poetry techniques”) have devised a taxonomy which separates between “mere” poetry generation and result enhancement. in mere generation, a computer produces poems based on existing human-written ones and an algorithm that prescribes how the former might be used. as stated in the paper, “the results of mere generation can appear nonsensical; this is not always a bad thing from an artistic perspective” (lamb et al. “a taxonomy of generative poetry techniques”). this is an interesting point that is worth some pondering. inasmuch as we are ready to accept that a human can produce nonsensical 9 developed by the center of informatics and systems of the university of coimbra, portugal. the generator comes with a diagram describing its operation. see: https://poetryme.dei.uc.pt/ 10 see a detailed account by its creator at https://github.com/rplevy/poevolve 11 deep-speare is a joint neural model of poetic language, meter and rhyme. see lau et al. https://aclanthology.org/p18-1181/ and https://aclanthology.org/p18-1181.pdf https://poetryme.dei.uc.pt/ https://github.com/rplevy/poevolve https://aclanthology.org/p18-1181.pdf humanist studies & the digital age linardaki 7.1 2022 7 poetry as a result of experimentation (because we know that they are capable of also producing poetry that makes perfect sense at the same time), we are less willing to accept that computers produce nonsensical poetry because it is their aim to do so. the primary reason for any nonsense is that ai uses words without understanding their meanings. ai may be able to tell that in the phrase “she has an apple”, “she” is a pronoun, “has” is a verb, and “apple” is a noun, or that “she” is the subject, “has” is the verb and “apple” is the object. but it cannot understand what this phrase is actually referring to in the real world nor draw a mental image, as the human brain does, of a woman holding an apple. words for ai are just data sequences, referring to no real information (harel and rumpe). in saussurian terms, we would say that words for ai are one-dimensional signs; they involve just the signifier, without having a clue on what the signified is. bostrom and yudkowsky agree to that when they say that what ai lacks is generality. ai is trained to perform a single task. in this way, it resembles other-than-human biological life; in the example that the authors use, beavers can build dams and bees can build hives, but beavers cannot build hives and bees cannot build dams. a human watching beavers and bees, however, can build both, because human intelligence is applicable more generally, reflecting this generality. this has also been noted by the european parliament research service, which has included in its report that a long-term goal of ai is the so-called artificial general intelligence (agi). methods of mere poetry generation among the methods of mere generation that lamb et al. (“a taxonomy of generative poetry techniques”) mention are the following: (a) templates. template generation, also called slot-filling, has seen a wide application, as was the case with the rimbaudelaires we saw above. templates can be extracted automatically from text, if lists of words or phrases pertaining to different categories (e.g. nouns or verbs) are drafted. then, line templates with slots into which words from given lists can be inserted are created. finally, words from the appropriate list are selected randomly to fill in the slots. otherwise, templates can be handcrafted. colton et al., for example, have used very short phrases (similes) mined from the internet, alongside the phrases of professional writers, namely journalists writing for the british guardian newspaper. the former phrases fit into the longstanding tradition of using the words of the common man in poetry, and the latter reflects ‘the desire to increase quality while not appropriating text intended for poems.’ (97) theirs was a template-based approach which produced not only poetry but also brief stories and comments that accompanied each poem. this is because they identified the problem of computers having not been taken seriously as creative entities to be one of a lack of appropriate context. thus, they saw that perhaps a story generator, able to produce “static framing information” and (in the future) to “reply with a story to any question asked of it in a dialogue situation” (101), would compensate for the lack of “human quality” in generating poems meant —after all— to be read by humans. the following is an example of a poem they generated, with the story first and then the poem entitled “blue overalls,” following: it was generally a good news day. i read a story in the guardian culture section entitled: “south africa's anc celebrates centenary with moment in the sun”. it talked of south africans, interfaith prayers and monochrome photos. apparently, “the heroic struggle against a racist regime was remembered: humanist studies & the digital age linardaki 7.1 2022 8 those thousands who sacrificed their lives in a quest for human rights and democracy that took more than eight decades” and “at midnight he watched with amusement as zuma lit the centenary flame, at the second attempt, with some help from a man in blue overalls marked ʻexplosivesʼ”. i wanted to write something highly relevant to the original article. i wrote this poem. (101) blue overalls the repetitive attention of some traditional african chants a heroic struggle, like the personality of a soldier an unbearable symbolic timing, like a scream blue overalls, each like a blueberry some presidential many selfless leaders oh! such influential presidents such great presidents blueberry-blue overalls lark-blue overalls a knight-heroic struggle (ibidem) the story is better than the poem in terms of meaning, though the algorithm becomes transparent because of the irrelevance of the two quotes, which give an overall awkward impression. the poem is weaker because, judged against manurung’s (an evolutionary algorithm approach to poetry generation) preconditions for sound aiproduced poetry, it has little meaningfulness (one of the main issues with template-based poetry generation). as lamb et al. (“a taxonomy of generative poetry techniques”) point out in their discussion of templates, this poem too suffers from useless repetitiveness, but there is also little coherence in the example. and even though grammaticality is ensured, poeticness is present only in the form of the poem, i.e. the stanzas that create a poetic impression. therefore, the problem is not one of context, as colton et al. claim; the problem is one of meaning. meaning, as we have seen from the examples so far, remains elusive for ai. as to the specific method, it should be added that the creativity of template-based generation is “open to discussion” (gervás “exploring quantitative evaluation of the creativity of automatic poets”), as the input is pre-defined and the choices involved are narrow. (b) markov chains. a markov chain is a statistical model applied to data in a series, calculating the probability distribution for each entry. the n entries used to make the probability prediction are each referred to as an n-gram. for poetry generation, entries would be words. entries could also be letters but that would produce a multitude of non-words and neologisms, an effect which could be intentional but is not successful in terms of outcome. an example of characters used as entries comes from roque; he introduces a poetry generator developed by r. w. “bill” gosper in the early 1970s at the artificial intelligence lab at the massachusetts institute of technology, using character n-gram generation. gosper approach was later called dissociated press. the following example cited by rogue is a representative output of dissociated press on lewis carroll’s alice in wonderland.12 12 a probability model can be generated from a specific work, as in this case, or from a broader corpus. humanist studies & the digital age linardaki 7.1 2022 9 (…) would guess, an’t grom one foot to thistle, to keep and reachinah’ll be she could not ever who had not atte-book hastily. convers began to trings: into thing on wast the door, and the. involving an automatic shuffling of words, as it does, markov chain poetry can be said to resemble magnetic poetry13 or even dadaist “cut-ups.”14 a project that involves markov chains is emily (shihadeh and ackerman). emily is a machine that aims to create original poems in the style of emily dickinson, and it was trained on publicly available emily dickinson poetry from the gutenberg project. with the help of markov chains, poems in the style of emily dickinson were attempted, relying on a dictionary that maps words found in dickinson’s poems to the words that proceed them to capture the relationships between them. an example of a dickinson-like poem produced by emily would be the following: poem 1 some shook their yellow gown and certainly her eye, they leap upon the rose smiling to die. the orchards eternity! applying again manurung’s (an evolutionary algorithm approach to poetry generation) preconditions for sound aiproduced poetry, we would say that the result is rather poor. even though grammaticality is achieved (save for the last line), meaningfulness is not, and poeticness exists only as an impression that borders ridicule. a weak point of markov chains is that even though they preserve many features of the input text, they cannot replicate grammar. (c) found poetry. this method involves skipping the generation process altogether and using a computer to harvest text written by humans. found poetry preserves entire human-written sentences that are presented outside their original context. a splendid example of found poetry are the haikus generated by hrešková and machová. hrešková and machová have produced haikus using two different approaches: an evolutionary algorithm and poem models. in the evolutionary algorithm approach,15 a corpus of haikus was built from two haiku portals containing human-written haikus. cross-overs, i.e. exchanges, were attempted from two or three existing haikus randomly. this corpus was then evolved by human judges rating every attempt. examples of such haikus are as follows: 13 magnetic poetry, devised by dave kapell, is based on moving around on a metal board words that are written on magnets. see the official website of this poetic movement https://magneticpoetry.com/ 14 at a surrealist rally in the 1920s dada poet tristan tzara proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. almost 40 years later, in the summer of 1959, painter and writer brion gysin cut newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at random. “minutes to go” resulted from this initial cut up experiment. “minutes to go” contains unedited unchanged cut ups emerging as quite coherent and meaningful prose. see burroughs, “the cut up method.” 15 evolutionary algorithms are just one of the various methods used in poetry generation. for other approaches, see lamp et al., “a taxonomy of generative poetry techniques”; gonçalo oliveira, “poetryme: a versatile platform for poetry generation”; gervás, “exploring quantitative evaluation of the creativity of automatic poets.”) humanist studies & the digital age linardaki 7.1 2022 10 spring wind an old lady tries again wet with rain aging beauty spring cascades into valleys as apple blossoms the haikus achieved are robust and convey a true sense of “haikuness,” i.e. poeticness according to the norms of the specific genre. both grammaticality and meaningfulness are also achieved. this is not to say that less meaningful haikus or haikus with confusing content were not created but that these were rather the minority. as enthusiastic as one can be with such a great result, the fact that whole lines of existing haikus were recombined bodes poor for originality or creativity. but the success of the result makes us understand that, considering mere generation methods, the quality of input is paramount. many generators take as input content from newspapers (such as colton et al.), blogs (e.g. wong and chun), psychological tests (netzer et al.), even the twitter (e.g. the twitsong, lamb et al., “can human assistance improve a computational poet?”). this does allow “using the words of the common man in poetry” (colton et al. 2012), but it is far from a poetic result. the main reason is that not all words of common man have poetic value. by contrast, when the input is highly relevant, as with the haikus generated by hrešková and machová, the result is more in line with a sound poetic production, even though it is poorer in terms of creativity. what should be preferred, then? an intensely human-driven poetic result, which is less creative in terms of the auxiliary role of ai, or a bad poetic result arrived at by ai alone? it could be argued that poetry generators should be about producing a sound poetic output (otherwise, why poetry generators?). but the truth is that it should not be poetic at all costs. the real issue of ai poetry generation is that it should be intelligent; in other words, the computer should be able to actually do it on its own. thus, the process by which a result is achieved is as important as the result itself. of course, the result is ultimately the measure by which the success of the attempt is rated. and the result often is, as we have seen, poor, especially so in terms of meaningfulness. enhancement of poetry generation results moving away from mere generation, lamb et al. (“a taxonomy of generative poetry techniques") next tackle the issue of enhancement with regard to poetic results. enhancement may be conducted either by a person or by the computer itself. human enhancement as is obvious, a human can enhance the output of poetry generators, editing the poems themselves. although this might ultimately render the generator useless in the first place, it is undeniably an established practice. it works marvelously for those who see computational text generation as nothing more than a good starting point for writing poetry, equal to the provision of raw material. humanist studies & the digital age linardaki 7.1 2022 11 the practice of human enhancement is evident in gnoetry (gnoetry daily), an application for interactive text generation in which some decisions are made by the computer and others by a human user. generated poetry is based on n-grams, but it is the user that provides the corpus. thus, a dialogue is established between the human and the computer (lamb et al. “a taxonomy of generative poetry techniques”). an example from gnoetry (gnoetry daily) is found below:16 the day stirs the bare limbs above me, dry breath from the frozen fields. inside, charred, still smoldering, i sit patiently with my despair, having done too little, for too long, to fan these flames, having been content enough, secure enough in my same fearful ways, narrow, shut in, obscure to myself. computer enhancement poetry generation results can also be enhanced by the computer itself. as pointed out by lamb et al. (“a taxonomy of generative poetry techniques”), “this set of methods comes not from the humanities but from scientists in the discipline of computational creativity” (198) and involves two main purposes. one is “optimization of the system’s output on some metric,” and the other is connection to underlying knowledge about the real world. beginning with the latter, lamb et al. (“a taxonomy of generative poetry techniques”) acknowledge that the nonsensical results of mere poetry generation are the “result of the computer’s lack of real-world experience” (198). it is the problem with the phrase “she has an apple,” as described above. the computer may be able to say which word is what kind of thing in terms of grammar or its place in a syntactic tree, but it cannot understand what this phrase is really about. this is a serious issue and the real reason behind the production of nonsense, yet this can be solved to some degree by the provision of knowledge bases. in poetry generation, a knowledge base programmed into the generation process may guide its output. this is done in much the same way as e.g. in gnoetry (gnoetry daily), where human input inside the generation process optimizes results. in particular, a knowledge base built on the calculation of the co-occurence of different words in a source text can give the computer a sense of which words go better together or are more relevant to a topic. knowledge bases may also be extracted from dictionaries and cover relations between words, such as junction, composition, opposition, causation, etc. (gonçalo oliveira, “poetryme: a versatile platform for poetry generation”). netzer et al. have produced quite good haikus from a list of word associations that are combined on the basis of syntactic templates: 16 more can be retrieved at https://gnoetrydaily.wordpress.com/ humanist studies & the digital age linardaki 7.1 2022 12 early dew the water contains teaspoons of honey spring bloom showing the sun’s pyre regarding optimization, a computer may be fed with some formal definition of the desired characteristics in a poem and can thus test different possibilities in order to choose the ones that best fit such characteristics. these are baby steps to critical thinking, but it is a start. lamb et al. (“can human assistance improve a computational poet?”) list several optimization methods, some of which are as follows: stochastic hill-climbing search, generate-and-test, case-based reasoning and recurrent neural networks. many such methods concentrate on issues of poetic form (e.g. rhyme and meter), with fewer on meaning, style, or emotions. twitsong (lamb et al. (“can human assistance improve a computational poet?”) browses tweets to choose those that are relevant to a topic and produce sentiment. the process generates poems that are composed of tweets which, although written by different people at different occasions, make up something reasonably meaningful, even though its poetic value could be strongly challenged: hey nashville… 2014 is pretty awesome! happy 2014 friends! be safe out there!! had a great new year’s eve at magic kingdom we started off 2014 with a prayer. lamb et al. (“can human assistance improve a computational poet?”) conclude that poetry generation is still at an infancy stage and that there is a lot to be expected. hopefully, that will be the case. why hopefully? because, it could lead to a new style or a new content of poetry, which would be simply refreshing. poetry generation in terms of target features lamb et al. (“a taxonomy of generative poetry techniques”) are not the only ones with a taxonomy of poetry generation systems; other scholars have too provided their own taxonomies. for example, gervás (“exploring quantitative evaluation of the creativity of automatic poets”) has presented four types of ai techniques employed in the generation of poetry and gonçalo oliveira (“a survey on intelligent poetry generation: languages, features, techniques, reutilisation and evaluation”) has tackled the point from a different perspective, allowing a closer glimpse at the workings of generators. more particularly, gonçalo oliveira makes a useful distinction between methods used to address the form features considered by poetry generators and methods used to address content features, both of which the following section will explore. form features form features play a prominent role in poetry generation, as they allow recognition at first glance that the output is, in fact, a poem. meter and rhyme are such form features that can be quite competently handled by computer programs. meter involves the number of syllables that each line of the poem must have, taking into consideration stress patterns. haikus, for example, have three lines that include 5-7-5 syllables, respectively (as humanist studies & the digital age linardaki 7.1 2022 13 is perceived in the west, at least), and limericks typically have 5 lines. moreover, sometimes stress patterns are also important. rhyme is the repetition of the same sound in different lines, according to the appropriate scheme, e.g. aaaa (monorhyme), aabbcc (coupled rhyme), abab (alternate rhyme), abba (enclosed rhyme), aabba (limerick), or aba bcb cdc etc. (terza rima, or chain rhyme). some systems deal with other kinds of rhyming apart from end-rhyme, e.g. assonance or alliteration. these involve the repetition of the same vowel or consonant sound, respectively, in some parts of the poem or throughout it. according to gonçalo oliveira, for “less phonetic languages such as portuguese or spanish […] it is often enough to design a set of orthography-based rules to handle meter and rhyme” (gonçalo oliveira et al., “a survey on intelligent poetry generation”; gervás, “an expert system for the composition of formal spanish poetry”). for english, poetry generators typically resort to pronunciation dictionaries, often online ones (see e.g. manurung, “a chart generator for rhythm patterned text”; tobing and manurung , “a chart generation system for topical metrical poetry”). content features even if form features are more easily tackled with ai, the issue of content remains paramount. no text can be considered a poem if it just follows a recognizable poetry form. it must contain language that, according to manurung (an evolutionary algorithm approach to poetry generation), ensures the central three elements we have already discussed: (i) grammaticality, (ii) meaningfulness and (iii) poeticness. out of these three, grammaticality seems to be the most easily achievable one; after all, natural language generation does involve syntactic rules, and lexical-syntactic patterns can also be achieved. meaningfulness, on the other hand, is more elusive. meaning is only loosely achieved in ai by using, for instance, words that belong to the same semantic domain (e.g. fruit-apple-orange-mango and other hypernymic-hyponymic relations, or synonyms/antonyms etc.) or by creating semantic clusters of words that are connected to each other in various ways (for instance, successful combinations of adjective and noun, verb and noun). such techniques may allow for the generation of other natural language texts, such as weather forecasts. for a weather forecast to be generated, there must be a computer that is able to recognize weather phenomena, e.g. storms, precipitation, hurricanes, and their movements. putting all these into a forecast would then require the computer to be able to name the weather phenomena, select interesting pieces of information while rejecting other not-sointeresting ones, and decide on a good textual structure, among other things (wright and purver). in poetry generation, meaning is attempted by exploiting a semantics model, a semantic knowledge base, or a statistical model of distributional semantics (gonçalo oliveira “multilanguage extension and evaluation”). semantics models are based on labelled relations between words and reflect a more theoretical view of linguistic knowledge. knowledge bases we have already discussed above in “computer enhancement.” distributional models of semantics consider how language is actually used, e.g. in a collection of texts, and assume that words occurring in similar contexts have similar meanings. in other systems, text is generated according to a grammar that handles syntax (manurung an evolutionary algorithm approach to poetry generation) or a grammar that is tightly related to semantics (gonçalo oliveira, “poetryme: a versatile platform for poetry generation”). mere text generation, however, simply does not suffice. the poem has to be meaningful, i.e., it must be about something, otherwise it must at least be able to respond to various stimuli ((gonçalo oliveira, “a survey on intelligent poetry generation”). such stimuli could be any of the following: a list of semantic predicates, e.g. humanist studies & the digital age linardaki 7.1 2022 14 love (john, mary) (manurung an evolutionary algorithm approach to poetry generation); one or more keywords that will set a semantic domain (e.g. netzer et al.; gonçalo oliveira, “poetryme: a versatile platform for poetry generation”); a text which can be a single sentence with a message (gervás “an expert system for the composition of formal spanish poetry”) such as a chunk taken from a newspaper (colton et al.). as for poeticness, figurative language is often implicitly present as a consequence of using human-produced poetry as input. we have seen the apt example of hrešková and machová’s haikus. there is, however, ongoing research in the field of figure-of-speech generation, e.g. regarding the generation of similes (as-as or like) mined by using google n-grams (veale) or the dynamic generation of similes from scratch (chakrabarty, muresan & peng).17 such similes are then used for the generation of other similes or metaphors or yet other figures of speech. but in real poetry, using figures of speech alone does not suffice; a supporting poetic context should also be in place. human or not poetry generators are not the only “poets” that produce strange results. like the computer scientists discussed earlier who were more interested in process than product, several modern poetic movements have favored experimentation over a result that would fit mainstream poetry standards, challenging even the idea of them. this certainly makes poetry generation look like another link in the long chain of poetic tradition, as will become clearer at the end of this section. some of the most striking such movements, involving algorithmic or algorithmic-like processes, are mentioned below. dada as early as in 1916, dada made its appearance as a poetic movement of the european avant-garde. coming into being around of world war i, its founders tried to “embody a simultaneously playful and nihilistic spirit alive among european visual artists and writers” (“dada”). they attempted to salvage a sense of freedom from the instability that characterized european society in the aftermath of the war, embracing both “everything and nothing” in their desire to “sweep, sweep clean,” as tristan tzara wrote in the dada manifesto in 1918. these dada poems were made of cut-ups, combined in the form of collage to produce a syntactic result that encouraged readers to question what they were reading and make up their meanings for the poems’ words. the following is a representative dada poem entitled “assessment” from three poems by tristan tzara: 17 the achievement of chakrabarty et al. makes us realize that the real benefit lies in seeing through human brain processes and trying to reproduce them, as if reinventing them. this would necessarily also make ai another way of understanding human intelligence better. humanist studies & the digital age linardaki 7.1 2022 15 considering that the origins of this poem are from different sources, as is evident by the different styles of the cut-ups, one could argue that — but for the stylistics — a poem generator that uses human-written texts as input seems to walk on a very similar path to dada. stream of consciousness stream of consciousness is another notable example of literature written without much concern for the outcome. the term “stream of consciousness” was coined by the psychologist william james in the principles of psychology (1890). this style intended to render “the flow of impressions — visual, auditory, physical, associative, and subliminal — that impinge on the consciousness of an individual and form part of his awareness along with the trend of his rational thoughts.”18 this technique was adopted by many poets, one of which is notably gertrude stein. here follow two poems of hers: red faces red flags the reason for pretty flags. and ribbons. ribbons of flags and wearing material reason for wearing material. give pleasure. can you give me the regions. the regions and the land. the regions and wheels. all wheels are perfect. enthusiasm.19 america once in english they said america. was it english to them. 18 https://www.britannica.com/art/stream-of-consciousness 19 https://allpoetry.com/red-faces https://www.britannica.com/art/stream-of-consciousness https://allpoetry.com/red-faces humanist studies & the digital age linardaki 7.1 2022 16 once they said belgian. we like a fog. do you for weather. are we brave. are we true. have we the national colour. can we stand ditches. can we mean well. do we talk together.20 both poems are asyntactic to some extent and contain a flow of ideas that is not easy to follow. they resemble very much the current output of poetry generators. oulipo oulipo, another poetic movement mentioned in “digital humanities versus computational creativity,” emphasized systematic, self-restricting processes of making texts that resemble algorithms. for example, the technique known as n+7 replaced every noun in an existing text with the noun that followed seven entries after it in the dictionary. by applying the n+7 rule to wallace stevens’s poem “ (stephens), for example, one gets a completely new poem, “the soap mandible” (“a brief guide to oulipo”): the soap mandible one must have a miniature of wisdom to regard the fruit and the boulders of the pinions crusted with soap; and have been colic a long time to behold the junkyards shagged with idaho, the spun-yarn rough in the distant gloom of january surgery; and not to think of any mishap in the south of the winter, in the south of a few lectures, which is the south of the language full of the same winter that is blowing in the same bare plague for the lithographer, who listens in the soap, and, now himself, beholds now that is not thermal and the now that is. 20 https://allpoetry.com/poem/8529995-america-by-gertrude-stein https://allpoetry.com/poem/8529995-america-by-gertrude-stein humanist studies & the digital age linardaki 7.1 2022 17 another oulipo exercise uses the “snowball” technique, where the first line is one letter long, the second line has two letters, and so on. in the 15-line snowball poem that follows by harry mathews, each line is n+1 character longer than the previous: i am the text which begins sparely, assuming magnitude constantly, perceptibly proportional, incorporating unquestionable incrementations as becomes evident from the above samples, oulipians were more interested in experimentation than in the outcome, as is often the case with art. why should ai generated poetry be any different? language poetry language poetry, or langpo, is yet another example of poetry that could have been written by a poetry generator. among the key beliefs of langpo lies the idea that language is what dictates meaning. langpo poets also intend to make the reader actively involved in the text: “by breaking up poetic language, the poet[s are] requiring the reader to find a new way to approach the text” (“a brief guide to language poetry”). an example of a langpo poem is the following, an excerpt from “letter 7” written by michael palmer (palmer): letter 7 (excerpt) but the buried walls and our mouths of fragments, no us but the snow staring at us . . . and you mr. ground-of_what, mr. text, mr. is-was, can you calculate the ratio between wire and window, between tone and row, copula and carnival and can you reassemble light from the future-past in its parabolic nest or recite an entire winter’s words, its liberties and psuedo-elegies, humanist studies & the digital age linardaki 7.1 2022 18 the shell of a street-car in mid-turn or scattered fires in the great hall i would say not-i here i’d say the book of knots i’d say undertows and currents and waterspouts, streaks of phosphorus and rivervine winds dear z, i’d say it’s time, it’s nearly time, it’s almost, it’s just about, it’s long past time now time now for the vexfor the voxfor the voices of shadows, time for the prism letters, trinkets and shrouds, for a whirl in gauzy scarves around the wrecked piazza flarf a 21st century poetry movement reflecting similar themes is flarf, which thrives on language from the web to arrive at odd juxtapositions and grammatical inaccuracies. flarf also celebrates deliberately bad or “incorrect” poetry by forcing clichés, swear words, onomatopoeia, and other linguistic aberrations into poetic shape (“flarf”). flarf poets mine such odd terms from google to arrive at often hilarious and sometimes disturbing poems, plays, and other texts (a technique called “google sculpting”). the extensive use of internet resources is much akin to most poetry generators. an example of flarf poetry is the following poem by rodney koeneke (koeneke): bug’s psalm the bug’s psalm: don’t get crushed. afterlives feel meaningless but spring will come, push out the nubs the kids braid into pallets. take up your pallet from lawns noon’s hardly touched. the small think gods just loll on clouds. bugs think gods just crush. the incoherence of this poem makes one think that it could actually have been written by a computer, but it is again an example of human-written poetry for the sake of experimentation. blackout or erasure poetry last but not least, blackout or erasure poetry can be said to resemble the workings of poetry generators, erasing as it does all the words in a given text save for those that it chooses to create a poem. it is therefore a humanist studies & the digital age linardaki 7.1 2022 19 process of narrowing down the words from a given text (newspaper articles are used very often; however, most any text will do) to a few ones according to what the poet sees fit (glatch). an example of blackout poetry — rather bad, but helpful for the sake of the argument — would be the following: great success against time is you look on the outside like you feel miller, e. ce. “blackout poetry is a fascinating art form you can try at home right now.” august 28, 2017. https://www.bustle.com/p/what-is-blackout-poetry-these-fascinating-poems-are-created-from-existingart-78781 all the foregone examples help to show that sometimes people, too, write poetry as if they were computer generators, not minding incoherence, elliptical meaning, or even nonsense being produced. this fact highlights the elusiveness of poetry and creativity; not only it cannot be solidly defined, but it also means different things to different people or groups of people over time. what’s more, ai attempts at poetry generation are not so different from similar human attempts. this means that, in a way, ai attempts are actually worth a place in the long tradition of poetry as it evolves. human or bot having said all of the above, is it even possible to understand nowadays if a poem has been written by a human being or a computer? the answer is that sometimes, indeed, it is not. this is because some ai attempts have, in fact, proven to be of very good quality — and because human beings have written poems that can closely mimic computer attempts. so, if there are computers that write as computers, computers that write as human beings, human beings that write as human beings, and human beings that write as computers, “what on earth is going on”? this question was posed in a tedx speech by oscar schwartz, a writer, poet, and creator https://www.bustle.com/p/what-is-blackout-poetry-these-fascinating-poems-are-created-from-existing-art-78781 https://www.bustle.com/p/what-is-blackout-poetry-these-fascinating-poems-are-created-from-existing-art-78781 humanist studies & the digital age linardaki 7.1 2022 20 of an online site on ai versus human-written poetry (schwartz).21 schwartz further talks about the capacity of being human and what can define it. is it something with which we are born, or something that we are trained to become? and how do we define who — or what — is part of it? generalizing therefore on the concept of ai and not restricting it to poetry, let us consider it, for a while, in relation to humanness. in 2017, six scientists wrote and signed a manifesto in which they also wonder: is the capacity of being human something that can be lost or won? (barzov, “manifesto: time for humanness learning”). are those who torture, kill, humiliate human existence still considered human? is a person born in a western country more human than an indigenous in, say, new zealand? in the end, is human nature a social, thus changing, construct? and they end up saying: “it’s time for us to come out and start building a community of ai scientists, neuroscientists, philologists, game developers, historians of literature, movie producers, writers, entrepreneurs – all those who are united by the passion to discover the first principle of humanity and —furthermore— by the genuine desire to provide humans and machines with compelling and efficient tools of learning and relearning to be human” (barzov, “manifesto: time for humanness learning”). but how can computers and ai “learn to be human” if they are not? the idea of granting “personhood” to ai has already become a point of scrutiny. to begin with, it has been the case for non-humans to be considered persons in certain countries. in the usa, corporations like the south pacific railway have been granted the rights of free speech and freedom of religion since 1881 (winkler). in other countries, like new zealand or mexico, natural sites such as the te urewera forest or mount taylor, respectively, have person-like rights (colwell). on the other hand, there are law scholars today who have shown that anyone can assign legal personhood to a computer by having it run a limited liability corporation in the usa. in this way, it could own property, hire lawyers, sue, and enjoy protections provided under law as if it were a regular human being. and what about the robot sophia to which saudi arabia granted citizenship, causing objections from saudi women who noted that the robot was given more rights than them? (yampolskiy)? granting personhood to ai is an issue that has occupied a number of law scholars, also involving scholars from other fields like ethics (garcia). gunkel and wales have recently looked at it from two different standpoints, one involving philosophy and law (gunkel) and another involving theology and psychology (wales). gunkel (gunkel and wales) draw a useful division between natural and legal persons; they state that natural persons are those who possess the capability of speech, have consciousness, and are able to experience pleasure and pain, whereas legal persons are entities defined as such not due to their innate qualities but rather following a legal decision. then, gunkel cites “human beings of diminished intellectual capacity or in a persistent non-responsive state” (475) who are not full legal persons. this makes us understand that, although there are non-human entities that are considered legal persons as we saw above, there are also humans who, by contrast, are not considered to be such. one can also note at this point the suggestion of the european parliament for ais to be considered “electronic persons,” which was reflexively followed by an open letter signed by 250 scientists, engineers, and ai professionals opposing the suggestion and asserting that robots and ai are nothing more than tools (open letter). wales (gunkel and wales), on the other hand, tackles the issue of the interior life of human beings, who engage in “voluntary self-gift” as they meet other human beings’ interiorities in a fusion of minds through 21 that site was bot or not (botpoet.com). the user had to decide whether the poem that he saw on his screen was written by a computer or a human. it operated, in other words, on the basis of “turing tests.” a turing test, named after the computer scientist alan turing, is intended to show whether a machine can convince someone that it is human. sadly, this site is no longer live. humanist studies & the digital age linardaki 7.1 2022 21 empathy and conscious understanding. artificial neural networks, as he points out, are just biologically inspired simulations without any such characteristics or potential. ai, wales argues, “is a sedimentary reflection of our own personhood. it is artificial in the original sense of that word – an artifact, a work of skill that we have brought forth by gazing into a computational pool of narcissus” (480). in other words, even if we create computers with human form or capacities, they will remain mirrors of human beings, who — among other things — feature self-awareness and a sense of identity. these are qualities that something that a machine, which is programmed just to execute orders, cannot ever possess. transhumanist thinkers have long pondered such issues (bostrom, “a history of transhumanist thought”). is it, then, ever imaginable for a mirror to reach or overcome that which it mirrors? this remains to be seen, literally. all these discussions and ideas are, of course, far-fetched when it comes to poetry generators that employ human-driven imaginative combinations of human-created examples to come to a result. computational creativity, at present, remains useful in helping humans with their own creative endeavors, even though its attempts at imitating human creativity have yielded interesting and at the same time ineffectual results. it does not possess imagination, however, nor inspiration of its own, and any talks about personhood in this case would only seem irrelevant (barzov, “human intelligence (hi) is underrated”). the real value of computational creativity perhaps rests in what it can reveal about human creativity and cognition (carleton university). but what about the future? according to dormehl, “computational creativity has been ignored. right now, either fondly or maliciously, it is being laughed at. next it will start fighting our preconceptions.” it is true that when ai creates something, we have the tendency to credit its programmer alone. after all, machine creativity today typically involves humans making at least some of the decisions. however, the boundary between programmer and computer is becoming increasingly fluid and indistinguishable, as many of the computer methods of today produce results with production details that the programmer has no clue how to explain. the scholar matthias corroborates this when he says that the programmer of a neural network, for instance, has little control past the point of coding. soon, perhaps, the credit for any ai achievement will be split between humans and machines in much the same way as with films written by two scriptwriters, even if this will, in fact, mean that ai has to acquire legal personhood. such a development will seem less and less bizarre as ai grows more and more capable of performing the duties assigned to it. after all, philosopher immanuel kant held that moral concern should extend equally to all rational beings, including ones that may appear from other planets. according to boddington, kant might also have added that it could apply to ai, if ai had had then the widespread presence it has today (13). it is also possible that the train of thoughts we currently follow is distracting us from perceiving the real opportunities and challenges which confront us in the age of ai (gunkel and wales). maybe what we need is a more refined ontology that does not see the world in terms of black and white. and maybe it is computational creativity that will show us the way to it, which would make it truly invaluable. works cited “a brief guide to language poetry.” poets.org, academy of american poets, 2004, https://poets.org/text/brief-guide-language-poetry. accessed 22 july, 2021. “a brief guide to oulipo.” poets.org, academy of american poets, 2004, https://poets.org/text/briefguide-oulipo. accessed 22 july, 2021. https://poets.org/text/brief-guide-language-poetry https://poets.org/text/brief-guide-oulipo 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https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/could-an-artificial-intelligence-be-considered-a-person-under-the-law https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/could-an-artificial-intelligence-be-considered-a-person-under-the-law poetry at the first steps of artificial intelligence christina linardaki introduction why poetry in the first place? the baby steps of poetry generation digital humanities vs computational creativity online poetry generators for fun poetry generators as academic projects methods of mere poetry generation enhancement of poetry generation results human enhancement computer enhancement poetry generation in terms of target features form features content features human or not dada stream of consciousness oulipo language poetry flarf blackout or erasure poetry human or bot works cited humanist studies & the digital age, 4.1 (2015) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.4.1.3682 re-reading petrarca in the digital era massimo lollini and pierpaolo spagnolo abstract as part of the seminar re-reading petrarca in the digital age –taught at the university of oregon in winter 2014– a digital close reading of francesco petrarca’s rerum vulgarium fragmenta (rvf) led to a series of parallel and entwined activities and projects. deeply integrated with the oregon petrarch open book project (opob), the course was oriented towards the encoding of petrarca’s masterpiece based on the implementation of a network of different themes (poet, laura, metaphysics, nature, metamorphoses, and urban culture). the various occurrences and data obtained from the encoding were collected into an online database that is still operating and updatable. the results of this qualitative data collection were also compared with a quantitative computer-based research of selected keywords extracted from the various themes. from the beginning of the seminar, the class was divided into groups and each of them read the rvf focusing on one of themes chosen while at the same time paying attention to the others. the different groups considered these themes as interrelated and interdependent. the poet is the sphere in which all the topics emerge in their specific connotations. however, his sphere is related to, dependent on and intersected by the other four spheres. the encoding allowed measuring the different manifestations, levels and meanings of the intersecting relationships. the study of the visual interpretation of the rvf in the inc. queriniano g v 15 paralleled the close reading and encoding activity and helped students to develop a visual rendering of their themes and a pointed, original and creative interpretation of petrarca’s masterpiece. introduction this article presents part of the activities and results of a seminar on re-reading petrarca in the digital era taught in spring 2014 at the university of oregon using the resources of the oregon petrarch open book, a working database-driven hypertext in and around francesco petrarca’s rerum vulgarium fragmenta. the class addressed the question of how to read petrarca’s masterpiece in the digital world, in a pedagogical situation in which in most western societies the single textbook and the traditional reading processes are not at the center of the learning experience anymore thanks to the resources available on the cultural internet. stanley fish's recent challenging questions to the digital humanities were at the core of this course: "does the digital humanities offer new and better ways to realize traditional humanities goals? or does the digital humanities completely change our understanding of what a humanities goal (and work in the humanities) might be?" (“the digital humanities and the transcending of mortality”). http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ http://petrarch.uoregon.edu/ http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/article/view/3196/3011 http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/article/view/3196/3011 humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 61 in the first section of the course the class discussed some crucial theoretical and methodological premises of digital humanism. while our specific goal was to elaborate a digital close reading of petrarca’s rvf based on the encoding of a thematic network of selected poems, we did at the same time contemplate the elaboration of a quantitative approach to the rvf as a whole. the main activity of the class was focused on reading, encoding, and interpreting poems based on critical inferences rather than on numbers and quantitative data about a text or a series of texts. in this respect, we shared stanley fish’s concerns about reducing the reading activity to numbers (“mind your p’s and b’s: the digital humanities and interpretation”). however, in the end we did find useful to parallel the critical and qualitative approach to the text with a quantitative one. on the one hand, the possibility of reading the text of the rvf in more than one version, in different media and formats belonging to different historical contexts proved to be extremely useful in triggering an informed and at the same time creative interpretation of the text. on the other hand, once we had elaborated the results of the digital close reading and encoding of selected poems we found worthwhile to approach a digital distant reading of the rvf based on the thematic keywords collected through the close reading. the experience of our class proved that data mining, looking for word frequencies or patterns in texts, and comparing and analyzing different texts, can be a meaningful research tool if associated with what remains the basis of humanism: close reading. the point of departure of our reading was the contingency of the individual poem. in the tenweek seminar students divided in groups read the entire rvf and followed petrarca’s narration from the beginning to the end; however, they performed their interpretative activity encoding a selection of specific poems every week. the thematic network of the rvf was not a series of abstract and general themes imposed from the outside; it was elaborated as a work in progress through the encoding and conceived as an organic inner part of the poems. on the one hand, the teacher was interested in particular to explore the presence and importance of nature in petrarca’s poems; on the other hand, after students started encoding and interpreting the poems, a new, more complex and articulated thematic network emerged. this network of themes extracted from within the poems themselves included the poet, laura, metaphysics, nature, metamorphosis and urban life. each group of students paid attention to all these themes in their encoding. nonetheless, they chose from the sequences of the rvf assigned weekly the poems to encode and interpret based on their special interest in and sensitivity to one of the themes. we considered the themes as interrelated and interdependent, as an expression of the conception of the universe as “great chain of being” comprising an infinite series of links ranging in a hierarchical order and culminating in the ens perfectissimum (lovejoy 59). the poet is the site at which all the topics emerge and converge in their specific connotations. however, his sphere is related to, dependent on, and intersected by the other four spheres. the encoding was meant to study the different manifestations, levels, and meanings of the intersecting relationships. some students decided to learn the basic tei encoding and worked towards this goal with karen estlund, quondam director of the university of oregon digital scholarship, who introduced them to the idea of digital close reading and encoding and followed their weekly encoding of petrarca’s poems. one example of students’ enconding in tei is included in appendix 1 of this article. nevertheless, all the students preferred to use a color-code system that was intuitive and humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 62 in the end proved to be a very effective interpretative tool to complement the reading of the poems.1 the goal of our enconding was to create the textual conditions for conceiving the poet, laura, nature, urban life, and metaphysics not as separate entities but as the result of a complex and articulated system of relationships that the color encoding would reveal as varied in the different poems encoded. the colors related to the spheres were red for the poet, pink for laura, green for nature, grey for urban life and blue for metaphysics. in the digital close reading we conceived metamorphosis as the result of the intersection of all these themes represented by the pentagon highlighted at the center of figure 1. figure 1 depending on the frequencies of the words encoded as associated with one particular theme the close reading of the various poems disclosed four specific situations that the class used as criteria to summarize the results of the encoding for each poem: 1. irreducible alterity of nature, laura and the divine; all the spheres are present as limits to the sphere of the poet that tends to prevail exhibiting his erotic desire and/or imposing paradoxes, antithesis and/or ethical reflections on his relationship to the other spheres. 2. the natural environment is removed or present only in the background in contrast to the urban setting of the poem. the poet tends to prevail again at times with a polemic voice and/or moral and/or political considerations. 3. immersion in the natural environment perceived as a unitary and metamorphic, living reality in which the human being partakes; all the spheres are playing an important role in relation to each other but nature and the landscape tend to prevail and have a voice while the poet inclines to withdraw from the scene of the poem. in this case the encoding makes 1 the color-code will be reworked and transformed into tei code before being published in the opob. humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 63 visible to active role that nature plays in elevating petrarca’s thoughts, directing them towards a meditation on love, death, and eternity. 4. sacralization and idealization of the human being as isolated from reality; in this case “metaphysics” tends to prevail. ultimately, the relationships between the spheres are related to and depend on the two opposite ideas of god emerging in medieval neoplatonism. on the one hand, the self-sufficient and disembodied one, expressing the conception of the fullness of the good as being attained once and for all in god. on the other hand, the second conception – present in one of petrarca’s sources, plato’s timaeus – conceived the idea of the good in terms of self-transcendingfecundity becoming the spring of the many different facets of the creation (lovejoy 45-55; gentile). we considered the first two criteria along with the fourth described above as related to the otherworldly idea of god as one and self-sufficient; these two criteria tend to reflect the spiritual, ethical, and political concerns of the poet whose subjective sphere prevails over the others. on the other hand, we related the third criterion to the idea of good as self-transcending fecundity and the originating principle of becoming and the cosmos. this second conception finds it best expression in the pythagorean idea of anima mundi elaborated in plato’s timaeus (34c-36c), which with its holism fosters an analogical and “ecological” mindset pointing to the inter-dependence of human beings with their environment and the other organisms. the encodings performed in our class reveal the different metamorphic facets of the productive thematic intersections between the poet, laura, metaphysics, nature and urban life. in the following section we present one example of color encoding for each theme along with a very brief commentary. moreover, we will present the general statistics of word occurrences per theme based on the limited number of poems we encoded. finally, we will introduce the result of a distant reading of the rvf based on the selection of key words encoded for each theme. these encodings were performed as an experiential contribution to the project of a thematic network of the rvf that after the necessary revisions and improvements will be implemented in the opob. 1. encoding for a thematic network of the rvf the 2014 seminar comprised ten students who were divided into three groups. each group building on the semantic and cumulative value of the weekly encodings developed a specific theme, a special path in the rvf, represented by a specific color. the first group was composed of three students who detected “metaphysics” as special theme and accorded it the color blue; the second group identified the “poet” as main theme, and used the color red to encode; the third selected “metamorphosis” as principal theme but, construing metamorphosis as the result of the interaction among the other themes, decided not to use a special color for the encoding. finally, the teacher produced for each class a close reading and encoding of poems related to the theme of nature, creating in this way a fourth group which used the color green. the process of encoding a poem was fairly thorough and required an attentive method of close reading. for every group it was essential to break down not only the poem itself as a whole into stanzas but also to analyze every single verse and every single word. furthermore, each group had to take into account the role of that particular poem within the rvf. to this end the members of the different groups, taking advantage of the resources available in the opob and updating them as humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 64 well, introduced in every class meeting the summary of all the poems considered in that specific week, providing the narration of the major events taking place in petrarca’s masterpiece. the students used as main text of the rvf giuseppe savoca’s recent critical edition; also, they were exposed to the evolution of the text from the manuscript tradition to print culture. they could compare versions of a number of poems in the cod. queriniano d ii 21, in the inc. queriniano g v 15 and in the diplomatic edition of the text prepared by ettore modigliani. the class was taught in english; all the students but one could read and encode the text in italian; some students of spanish consulted los sonetos y canciones del poeta francisco petrarcha, translated by henrique garcés. all these resources were conveniently available in the opob. in particular, the weekly reading of the copy of the editio princeps of petrarca's rvf from the queriniana library in brescia (incunabulum queriniano g v 15, – a unique and marvelous edition of the rvf including extensive illustrations that serve as elaborate visual glosses of fundamental natural and psychological motifs in the poems, – was very inspirational and suggestive, providing a visual commentary to the poems that proved to be very important to elaborate the interpretation of the rvf as a whole produced by this class. we now introduce now some examples of encoding starting from group one. this group consisted of three students, two undergraduates, beau battista and rebecca rosenberg, and one graduate, michele agresta. they primarily focused on metaphysics. in one example, sonnet 244, the poet responds to a friend who asked him for advice about life and love. petrarca responds saying that love is an endless war and that destiny cannot be stopped by anything. one must, therefore, trust heaven and encourage love while continuing the journey of life. il mal mi preme, et mi spaventa il peggio, al qual veggio sì larga et piana via, ch’i’ son intrato in simil frenesia, et con duro penser teco vaneggio. né so se guerra o pace a dio mi cheggio, che ’l danno è grave, et la vergogna è ria. ma perché più languir? di noi pur fia quel ch’ordinato è già nel sommo seggio. ben ch’i’ non sia di quel grand’onor degno, che tu mi fai, che te n’ingana amore, che spesso occhio ben san fa veder torto, pur d’alzar l’alma a quel celeste regno è il mio consiglio, et di spronare il core, perché ’l camin è lungo, e ’l tempo è corto. here are the thematic word frequencies collected for this poem and their visualization in a simple pie chart:2 2 the pronoun “tu” in verse 10 is encoded as a symptom of a conversation indicative of “urban culture”. this theme is the less developed and explicit in our series. it requires further elaboration in the final encoding that will be published in the opob. we decided to include it as representative of an historical and cultural category distinct from “nature”. humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 65 table 1 nature mphys poet laura urban frequencies 0 9 4 1 1 percentages 0% 60% 26.6% 6.6% 6.6% pie chart 1 the group related this poem to the fourth criterion outlined in the introduction, pointing to the sacralization and idealization of the human being. group two, on the other hand, consisting of graduate student pierpaolo spagnolo and the undergraduate students adrian leon and steven packard, decided to concentrate their readings on the figure of poet within the rvf. an example of the poems they analyzed is sonnet 254 in which petrarca does not know for sure whether his sweet and beloved "enemy" laura is dead or not, and so his heart is torn. he imagines that god wanted to take her to the heavens because of her beauty and her virtue. petrarca states that if laura is dead, his life has come to an end as well. the group members chose to encode this specific poem because it discussed the metaphysical and sentimental elements related to the poet’s own persona, placing the poet at the center of the poem. 3 i’ pur ascolto, et non odo novella de la dolce et amata mia nemica. né so ch’i’ me ne pensi, o ch’i’ mi dica, sì ’l cor tema et speranza mi puntella. nocque ad alcuna già l’esser sì bella, questa più d’altra è bella et più pudica. forse vuol dio tal di vertute amica torre a la terra, e ’n ciel farne una stella*, anzi un sole*. et se questa è la mia vita, i miei corti riposi, e i lunghi affanni son giunti al fine. o dura dipartita*, perché lontan m’ài fatto da’ miei danni? 3 the asterisk attached to some key words indicates that those words are encoded for more than one theme. humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 66 la mia favola breve è già compita, et fornito il mio tempo a mezzo gli anni table 2 nature mphys poet laura urban frequencies 1 4 12 4 0 percentages 4.7% 19% 57.1% 19% 0% pie chart 2 the group related this poem to the first criterion outlined in the introduction, pointing to the alterity of laura and the divine. unlike the other groups, group three, consisting of graduate students jake monzingo and miriam muccione and undergraduate students emily letcher and peter kinzig, identified a new element within the rvf, one not previously identified by the class as a specific sphere. they chose to focus their readings on metamorphosis as the central theme throughout petrarca’s cycle. the group conceived this theme as the result of the interaction among the other thematic elements. in other words, metamorphosis is the underlying principle of all the intersecting spheres including the poet, laura, nature, metaphysics, and urban life. an example of a poem studied by group three is sonnet 313. in this poem, laura has died and the poet is suffering. she has left him alone with his tears and the poems he has dedicated to her. he imagines her in heaven, where she will be rewarded for her virtue. petrarca longs to be with her, surrounded by blessed souls. metamorphosis occurs, in part, because everything has changed, starting from the moment his heart was pierced by her eyes. laura is now a metaphysical figure and her eyes mediate between the poet and the metaphysical sphere. passato è ’l tempo omai, lasso, che tanto con refrigerio in mezzo ’l foco vissi. passato è quella di ch’io piansi et scrissi, ma lasciato m’à ben la penna* e ’l pianto*. passato è ’l viso sì leggiadro* et santo*, ma passando i dolci occhi al cor m’à fissi. al cor già mio, che seguendo partissi lei ch’avolto l’avea nel suo bel manto*. ella ’l se ne portò sotterra, e ’n cielo humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 67 ove or triumpha, ornata* de l’alloro* che meritò la sua invicta honestate*. così disciolto dal mortal mio velo ch’a forza mi tien qui, foss’io con loro fuor de’ sospiri* fra l’anime beate. table 3 nature mphys poet laura urban frequencies 7 6 14 15 2 percentages 15.9% 13.6% 31.8% 34% 4.5% pie chart 3 the group related this poem to the first criterion outlined in the introduction, pointing to the alterity of laura and the divine. finally, the teacher based his encoding on the theme of nature. here is one example, sonnet 9, which consists of a long metaphor comparing laura to the sun. in spring, under the skies of the constellation taurus, the sun (the “planet” that tells time) brings renewed life, color and energy to the world. not only are the hills and banks of rivers filled with color (flowers), but this energy also penetrates the earthly moisture (terrestro humore). in this way, the world is fertile, producing fruit and other such natural goods. in this way, laura is like the sun among women. she lays her brilliant gaze on petrarca, and triggers in him amorous thoughts, acts and words. despite this, spring will never come for petrarca due to his unrequited love. quando ’l pianeta che distingue l’ore ad albergar col tauro si ritorna, cade vertù da l’infiammate corna che veste il mondo di novel colore. et non pur quel che s’apre a noi di fore, le rive e i colli di fioretti adorna, ma dentro dove giamai non s’aggiorna gravido fa di sé il terrestro humore, onde tal fructo et simile si colga. humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 68 così costei ch’è tra le donne un sole in me movendo de’ begli occhi i rai cria d’amor penseri, atti, et parole. ma come ch’ella gli governi o volga primavera per me pur non è mai. table 4 nature mphys poet laura urban frequencies 9 1 2 4 0 percentages 56.3% 6.2% 12.5% 25% 0% pie chart 4 the teacher related this poem to the third criterion outlined in the introduction, pointing to the immersion of the poet in the natural environment perceived as a unitary and metamorphic, living reality in which the human being partakes. also, the poem is indicative of the idea of god as self-transcending fecundity triggering productive intersections between the poet, nature, laura and metaphysics, elevating petrarca’s thoughts and directing them towards a meditation on love that nevertheless remains unrequited. after reviewing one example of encoding for each group we now introduce the general statistics that resulted from the limited number of poems encoded. upon completing a number of encodings, we realized that the amount of information that we were collecting was significant. we thought that all the data collected could become very useful for further research and considerations. at this point we started looking for suitable software to collect the data. for us the most approachable and useful tool was without doubt microsoft excel; we decided to adopt it to collect the data of all our encodings. another particularly valuable tool that we combined with microsoft excel was google drive. by uploading the excel file into the google drive we made it accessible to every student. with this new tool, the class was eager to obtain an immediate graphic representation for each encoded poem to use for each class presentation. specifically, excel gave the opportunity for every single group to monitor the evolution of the five elements involved in the encodings. in detail, the excel file is composed of six pages; one page is entirely dedicated to overall results shared among all the groups. every single page connects to the file simultaneously so that each change made by the groups automatically updates the overall pie chart. this comprehensive page was very useful not only for visualizing the final result of the encoding for each group and for the entire class, but also to check the development of the project during the course. in fact, this page contains the pie charts for every single group and represents humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 69 at the same time the overall results for the individual paths. in this way, the students could constantly see the overall results of the group in comparison with the other groups and the project as a whole. each group had an entire page dedicated to its own path within the rvf. the pages consisted of a table in which the group inserted the entries from every poem encoded week by week, and a corresponding pie chart, which changed as new entries were added. the page also allowed students to create tables and a pie chart for individual poems. the students thus always had an up-to-date chart that reflected their latest work for weekly assignments and presentation. furthermore, we added another table in which the different groups could select the criteria chosen according to their encoding. all the calculations made in this file were possible thanks to a simple mathematical formula; all the data were visualized directly on the user-friendly online google drive file. following are the tables and charts recording the data for the class as a whole and for individual groups. table 5: overall course nature mphys poet laura urban frequencies 127 243 242 135 47 percentages 15.9% 30.6% 30.4% 17% 5.9% pie chart 5: overall course table 6: all groups nature mphys poet laura urban group 1 13 56 28 22 4 percentages 10.5% 45.5% 22.7% 17.8% 3.2% group 2 14 42 75 29 3 percentages 8.5% 25.7% 46% 17.7% 1.8% group 3 100 145 139 84 40 percentages 19.6% 28.5% 27.3% 16.5% 7.8% group 4 244 158 157 64 6 percentages 38.7 % 25.1% 24.9% 10.1% 0.9% humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 70 pie chart 6: group 1 pie chart 7: group 2 pie chart 8: group 3 pie chart 9: group 4 (prof. lollini) the following is the general list of frequencies for the four criteria identified through the encoding: table 7: criteria overall course criterion i ii iii iv frequencies 15 2 17 135 percentages 28.3% 3.7 % 32% 35.8% as part of our research effort, after compiling the statistics for the different themes based on the poems that we close-read and encoded, we carried out a mixed-initiative experiment in the interpretation of the rvf, which we termed “distant reading”. first, the different groups of student readers selected poems that well represented the diverse topics, adding this time metamorphosis as a special theme to the list that included the poet, laura, metaphysics, nature, and urban life. then, from their encoded poems, each group compiled a set of words that best exemplified or indicated the presence of their primary theme. the following are the words selected by the different groups through a contextual encoding and close reading: theme one (metaphysics): giove, marte, regno del ciel, regno dei cieli, carta, carte, emisfero, emisferi, hemispero, hemisperi, padre, padri, adversario, adversary, signor, croce, croci, dio, mortale, mortali, tormento, tormenti, sol, sole, soli, verdeggia, verdeggiare, male, mali, adamo, prego, pregare, ombrare, ombra, beato loco, beati loci, nebbia, nebbie, vivo fonte, sommo padre, caro dono, doni, peggio, via, vie, sommo humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 71 seggio, sommi seggi, amore, amori, celeste regno, celesti regni, camin, camino, tempo, tempi, mondo, mondi, salute, pace, paci, forza, forze, morte, morti, riva, rive. theme two (poet ): i’, io, mio, mei, miei, mia, mie, mi, me, aggio, proferto, lui, scaccio, sa, gire, chiama, suo, ama, son, colpe, temo, dilivrarmi, affatico, passo, darà, riposi, levimi, accoglie, smorsa, tene, sento, suoi, ardo, vorrei, devrei, rime, veggio, noi, ascolto, odo, dica, tema, puntella, affanni, ài, fatto, pensava, nodo, assolve, lega, trovaimi, poria, ritegno, era, ò, visto, giunto, sentia. theme three (laura): onesto amor, guerra, quella, colei, voglia ardente, belli occhi, sol, soave foco, donna, bella, desio, amor, giogo, atti, vaneggio, dolce, guerriera, occhi, for, ambedue, noi, ferra, tigre, orsa, angel, colei, sola, ella, bellezza, dolce, amata, nemica, bella, amor, madonna, bel piede, viso, occhi, questa, essa, sola, sorda, rigida, rosa, lauro, sue, oneste, onesta, dolci parole, laura, nobel alma, alma, ella, ben nata, tua morte, lei, gita, àmmi, quella, bella donna, tuo nome, svegliata, sola, suo, nodo, costei, capei d’oro, faville, l’aura, costei, dolce, ride theme four (nature): fiore, fiori, erba, erbe, herba, herbe, piaggia, fronda, frondi,  fronde, arboscello, arboscelli, viola, viole, selva, selve, fiume, fiumi, scoglio, lauro, pianta, colle, erbetta, elce, mare, animali, boschi, augelletto, augelletti, aspide, aspidi, ghiaccio, ghiacci, foco, fuoco, fuochi, aura, aere, alloro, campagna, campagne, acqua, acque, pesce, pesci, sasso, sassi, monte, monti, valle, valli, ramo, rami, terra, terre, zephiro, riva, rive, mare, abete, faggio, pino, rosignol, deserto, deserti, terreno, terreni, alba, albe, aurora, aurore, notte, verbo, natura, carne, terrestre, terrestro, limo, uomo, homo. theme five (urban culture): roma, giudea, borgo, tu, huom, città nemiche, fango. theme six (metamorphosis): luce, luci, traluce, cielo, cieli, l’aura, vento, tempo, alba, inalba, tramonto, notte, giorno, dì, luna, ombra, stella, stelle, aurora, fenice, morte, morto, vita, vivo, cambiare, sole, sol’, sol, solo, solean, lume, orione, cambiare, cangiar, portartene, venir, passato, passata, passando, trapasso,volubil, fuggendo,volar, partissi, altrove, rimove, novo, nove, rinove, errante, fuggitiva. art farley, a colleague from the university of oregon computer science department, developed a computer program in the programming language python that first removed insignificant stop words, i.e., conjunctions, pronouns, articles, and prepositions, from the entire rvf, leaving only meaningful words in the poems. then, the remaining words were matched against the words in each thematic set of words, with a count being maintained regarding each thematic set for each poem. thus, each poem had a profile in terms of the number of words it contained for each theme. summary counts of the occurrences of words for each theme and the number of times each theme had the most words in a poem are given in the table below: table 8 nature mphys poet mphos laura urban total word count 848 1502 2433 1361 2253 42 poems with most occurrences 21 22 174 31 1 1 humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 72 pie chart 10: distant reading there are clearly a number of shortcomings associated with our method of distant reading. some words are found in two thematic sets. given that words can have more than one meaning, one of those meanings may support a given theme, another meaning may not. by considering words out of context, the distant reading process has no way of knowing which meaning of a given word corresponds to a particular occurrence in a poem. on the positive side, we realized that the profiles computed for the poems by the distant reading process can guide the selection of further poems for close readings, indicating which poems have potentially interesting thematic interactions or best represent a given theme. in appendix 2 we present the statistics of our thematic distant reading poem by poem; in the long list of 366 poems it is possible to check how these statistics may help the reader to identify the poems in which the various themes selected by our class are best reflected. in the final weeks of the course, the adaptable excel file was provided with an additional page dedicated to the distant reading. the overall page in which we collected all the data of the digital close readings was then equipped with an additional table and pie chart entirely dedicated to the distant reading (pie chart 10). one of the valuable points of having the two pie charts together (close reading and distant reading) is that it gave the opportunity to the class to compare the general and partial result of two different ways of reading the rvf. limiting our comments here to the overall results, it is interesting to note that, on the one hand, the outcome of our digital close reading had metaphysics as a prominent theme and the poet and laura as second and third, followed by nature and urban life; on the other hand, the result of the distant reading had the poet as the principal theme immediately followed by laura, and then, at a farther remove, metaphysics, metamorphosis, nature and finally urban life. it is interesting to note that the thematic picture suggested by the distant reading is coincident with traditional readings of the rvf as a love story that has two main protagonists and a prevalent metaphysical orientation. in this reading, nature does not deserve the role of protagonist and metamorphosis is just one theme among others. on the other hand, the digital close reading based on an attentive semantic encoding of petrarca’s poems tells a different story. in this case, poet and metaphysics have a prominent role but the distance between them and laura and nature is not as large as to rule out the interpretation that they play a role of co-protagonists in the rvf. we believe that this different result is due to the effort that we made in our qualitative reading and encoding to conceive the thematic spheres as separate but at the same time as interdependent. in other words, in our perspective digital close reading favors a holistic approach humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 73 to the text considered as a metamorphic reality, resulting from the interaction between different agencies that in certain moments surpass the pure subjectivity of the poet. on the other hand, distant reading, like traditional literary approaches, tends to focus on certain aspects of the text that remain separate from the others, mainly the subjectivity of the poet. in reality, the same argument can be made for the close reading performed by each of the groups in the seminar that produced an encoding focused on a specific theme. however, what makes the difference is the collective voice of the class that in the end was able to embrace a broader and comprehensive point of view that took stock of the interdependence of the poems’ various themes. 2. close reading and visual interpretation the study of the visual interpretation of the rvf by antonio grifo in the inc. queriniano g v 15 paralleled our close reading and encoding activity described above. the teacher presented in each class grifo’s miniatures in the incunabulum queriniano, which thanks to an acls digital innovation fellowship he was able to publish in a digital edition within the hypertext project opob. the teacher held that grifo’s miniatures capture the essential role that nature plays in petrarca’s poetry, encouraging an expansive reading of the rvf that includes images and commentaries. grifo creates an effect of continuity by inventing a thematic and iconographic network based, on the one hand, on figures of the poet such as the poet-book quite often pierced by an arrow as metaphor of heartbreak and grief (fig. 2; 1v per fare una leggiadra sua vendetta). figure 2 on the other hand, grifo constructs his narrative around the figure of the serpent that has a truly broad metaphoric value, as it alludes to vital amorous spirits and fertility (fig. 3; 3v). humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 74 figure 3 the serpent is not simply reducible to lust and desire, or to the memory of the biblical snake. rather, it recalls ancient greek myths where the serpent was an attribute of earth personified, one of the four elements, and of ceres who represents earth. moreover, grifo’s serpent may be interpreted as the genius as conceived in ancient roman religion, a sort of spirit that could be incarnated also as a serpent, which, as the etymology from gignere suggests, has a generative meaning as a symbol of fecundity. among the writers that used it there is bernadus silvestris in his commentary on the aeneid and in cosmographia, a possible source of francesco petrarca's rvf. (hall 285; canova; chance 7-8; donati; folena goldolin) the serpent accompanies the book performing many different expressive positions and attitudes. in the illustration of sestina 237, non à tanti animali il mar fra l’onde, five serpents bite the book to convey the idea of a solitary poet wandering immersed in the natural landscape and pervaded by erotic desire (figure 4; 3v). humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 75 figure 4 student comments emphasized how the tails of the snake root the poet-book in the vital spirit of the earth (fig. 4); and how the poet-book and the serpent are always inserted in the ever-present garden-valley with river and flowers, in the trompe l’oeuil style of vaucluse. class discussion based on grifo’s images and reading of commentaries led to emphasize the idea that the miniatures trigger an interpretation of the rvf centered on the idea of metamorphosis that is essential to the interpretation of petrarca’s masterpiece and was already suggested by filelfo (one of grifo sources), author of one of the late fifteenth-century commentaries of petrarca consulted by the students of this class. (petrarcha: con doi commenti; cossutta 425-427; frasso 76-84) one student in the class, peter kinzing, transcribed filelfo's commentaries to poems 5 and 6 in which he explicates the role of metamorphosis. the students recognized how in the miniatures the poet of the rvf is still a “porous” and susceptible individual in deep dialogue with nature and intensely implicated in different forms of natural metamorphoses triggering metaphysical reflections on the salvific power of love. the teacher drew students’ attention to some illuminations where the serpent assumes a human male face (fig.5). figure 5 this transformation takes place in the illustrations of a group of poems, 314-319 characterized by a stringent reference to the death of laura. finally, the face of the serpent becomes the face of humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 76 a woman, laura, incarnating the vital, earthly energies once exclusively belonging to the dominion of the reptile (fig. 6). figure 6 it is not by chance that this transformation takes place in poem 264 (i’ vo pensando, et nel penser m’assale), which in the incunabulum queriniano g v 15 does not open part two of the rvf but immediately precedes the last poem, the canzone alla vergine (132r). the class appreciated the fact that the metamorphosis of the serpent does not completely erase the animal-like nature of the reptile until the very last poem. grifo depicts and creates a transient hybrid figure, which has the body of a serpent and the face first of a man, and then of a woman. in other words, he captures the deep nature of the metamorphosis not in the transformation from one state (animal) to another (human) but in the terrestrial metamorphic process itself, alluding at the same time to the fact that the process of becoming human is a work in progress and entails not only terrestrial transformations but also a metaphysical projection toward eternity. the turning point of this process is death – as petrarca writes in poem 316 – which “le disaguaglianze nostre adegua” (“evens out all our inequalities”). drawing in the second part of the course on the imagery elaborated by grifo’s miniatures presented in class and on the symbolism reflected in the students’ encoding of petrarca’s poems, the teacher asked each group of students to elaborate a visual interpretation of its theme by choosing a series of images that would represent its importance and serve to synthesize their reading of the rvf. also, the class discussion led the students to conceive the idea of a general synthesis of their images to be realized in a creative drawing that would reflect all the symbolism and the color-code themes they had elaborated. in other words, the seminar decided to realize an artistic rendering of the statistics developed through the encoding, a visual interpretation of petrarca’s rvf conceived as the result of a reading that includes different textual and iconographic layers. in the end the class chose the image of the serpent to illustrate an interpretation of the rvf that emphasize the centrality of the profound metamorphic and natural inspiration of petrarca's poems. this interpretation was implicit in the original idea of metamorphosis as the master theme governing the dynamic interaction of all the poems’ various themes. at this point, the students wanted to find a parallel to grifo's book-symbol, one that would speak to the different context of their reading in a digital environment. they found this other pregnant symbol in the marvelous lines of canzone 239, 28-30: nulla al mondo è che non possano i versi, humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 77 et li aspidi incantar sanno in lor note, non che ’l gielo adornar di novi fiori. [there is nothing in the world that cannot be done by verses/ they know how to enchant asps with their notes / not to speak of adorning the frost with new flowers.] while admitting the power of poetry not only to enchant asps but, more generally, to conquer nature in its beauty, the poet in the coda of the canzone is left with what at a first glance looks like an adynaton, “catching the breeze in a net” (in rete raccolgo l’aura). in the following image, grifo renders this idea by presenting aeolus blowing his wind toward the book and the serpent, which are supposed to hold it: figure 7 here are petrarca’s verses (239, 37-39) that caught the attention of the students: in rete accolgo l’aura, e ’n ghiaccio i fiori. e ’n versi tento sorda et rigida alma, che né forza d’amor prezza, né note. [in a net i catch the breeze and on ice flowers, and in verses i woo a deaf and rigid soul who esteems neither the power of love nor his notes.] the class decided to maintain petrarca’s symbolism of the net as a poetic symbol more apt than the book to convey the main idea of the poem. what is relevant here is not the confirmation of an unrequited love and the impossible task of his poetry to move laura who never cared for rhymes or verses. the image of the poet trying to catch l’aura – the breeze– in a net suggests furthermore the powerful and marvelous intersection of petrarca poetry with the breath of life in nature. this image reveals the awareness of the intermediary role of nature between the world of being and the world of becoming, connecting the earthly with the heavenly. as we wrote in the introduction, this conception of nature is related to the idea of the good in terms of a selfhumanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 78 transcending-fecundity that serves as the wellspring of the many different facets of creation.4 in other words, we interpreted rete following the latin etymology related to serere (to weave) as the perfect symbol for the infinite connections of petrarca poetry with life, nature, history, and culture. the net in our reading became also the symbol of the thematic network that we created in our class. in this way, the image of the serpent along with the one of the net became prominent in students' visual interpretation of the rvf. it is noteworthy that while the first printed edition of the rvf was focused on the image of the book, our interpretation, made possible by an attentive qualitative reading of petrarca's poems within the digital environment provided by the opob, in the end had at its core the image of the net. the class recognized how the incunabulum queriniano already offered a hypertextual interpretation of petrarca's cycle, one that is still inspirational for us today. the other symbols that were chosen by students for their visual interpretation included those openly connected to specific spheres, for instance, laurel (alloro) for nature, laura and poetry, and others that were considered important like the knot as a symbol of the connectivity of life. the seminar agreed that there was, for example, a clear allegorical parallel between the laurel and the name of laura. that is why the laurel is one of the symbols that the class adopted and is amply present in the drawing. in detail, every single group was asked to provide a list of the most significant symbols from their own encodings, but eventually, during the last weeks, they were asked to select only the one that best embodied their reading paths. these symbols selected by each group are: for group one (metaphysics), the sky; for group two (the poet), the knot and the rhymes themselves; and, leaving aside for the moment group three, which presented a special case, for group four (nature), the serpent. group one chose the sky mostly because of its obvious metaphysical connection with the divine imagery of the heavens. on the other hand, group two chose the knot because this metaphor is related to the semantic field of weaving which is proper to the creative activity of poetry. as the net discussed above, the knot connects the poet not only to laura but to life in all its forms. the most powerful example of this image is in poem 307: io pensava assai destro esser su l’ale non per lor forza, ma di chi le spiega, per gir cantando a quel bel nodo eguale, onde morte m’assolve, amor mi lega. [i thought i was skillful enough in flight (not by my power, but by his who spreads my wings) to sing worthily of that lovely knot from which death looses me, with which love binds me.] the image of weaving is crucial not only for the poet but also for nature, which petrarca conceives as a creative power as it appears clear in lines 8-11 of this poem: mai non poria volar penna d’ingegno, non che stil grave, o lingua, ove natura volò, tessendo il mio dolce ritegno. 4 lollini refers this conception of natura parens to bernardus silvestris’ cosmographia. for the relationship between petrarca and bernardus silvestris see the article by daniela folena goldolin in bibliography. humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 79 [never could any pinion of wit, let alone a heavy style or tongue. fly so high as nature did when she made my sweet impediment.] group 2 also chose the rhymes because they are an unambiguous symbol of poetry, and thus, the poet. group four selected the serpent both for the aforementioned reasons and because of persuasive power of grifo’s illustrations. for group 3, there was greater difficulty in selecting a symbol that represented the dynamic and abstract concept of metamorphosis. the group initially chose the phoenix because it is the symbol of metamorphosis par excellence, but also because we can find this allegory throughout the rvf. nonetheless, when the drawing project was added to the seminar, the group decided that the drawing itself was their symbol of metamorphosis because it captures the dynamic and vital movement of the metamorphic process that includes all the protagonists and their natural and metaphysical dimensions. following are all of the symbols identified as the most important in the poems that the various groups encoded and as the ones to be included in the drawing (fig. 8): alloro (laurel/bay), rete (net), cielo (sky), serpente (serpent) and nodo (knot).5 the drawing created by pierpaolo spagnolo included all the symbols that the various groups indicated as essential to the interpretation of the rvf elaborated by the class. it’s hard to explain the drawing without the full understanding of the work done in class. nevertheless, we will now offer considerations that will facilitate the reading or one of the possible readings of the drawing. once the reasons why the class decided to use these particular symbols have been explained, it seems appropriate to explain how we decided to put those symbols together. basically, nothing in the drawing is accidental. grifo’s illustrations surely inspired the conception of the drawing, but on the other hand, he had the chance to draw a picture for every single poem, thus following the entire evolution of the rvf. the class’ most difficult choice was the planning process. how can only one drawing represent a large collection of poems? pierpaolo spagnolo stated that in many cases the decision on how to include specific elements took place during the actual drawing process. 5 here is a partial list of occurrences: alloro (laurel/bay): 23 (167-169); 190 (3-4); 291 (7); 313 (9-11) 323 (53-54); 325 (22); rete (net): 4 (7); 105 (47); 181 (1-3) (12); 239 (37). cielo is the symbol for which we found most occurrences, 212. serpente (serpent): 99 (6); nodo (knot): 59 (17); 71 (51); 73 (79); 119 (76); 175 (2) (14); 197 (7); 214 (20); 256 (10); 268 (65); 270 (70) (93); 271 (1) (13); 283 (4); 296 (14); 305 (1); 307 (3); 330 (13); 359 (56); 361 (12). nonetheless, there are other symbols that were suggested by the class but that for different reasons were not openly included in the drawing. for instance, the symbol of the bird (and the dove) was omitted from the drawing because the idea of flying, thus reaching the sky, heaven and laura, was already communicated by the whole serpent that in the drawing is clearly attempting to reach the sky. on the other hand, in some cases, such as with the symbol of the labyrinth, the group initially selected this symbol but later, during the planning of the drawing, simply considered it not essential. uccello/colomba (bird/dove): 23 (165); 81 (13); 187 (5); fenice (phoenix): 135 (14-15); 185 (1); 210 (4); 321 (1); 323; labirinto (labyrinth): 211 (14); 224 (4). humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 80 figure 8: drawing. for a better view, see p. 97. the students decided that the percentage of colors in the drawing, and thus degree of prominence accorded to each symbol, should reflect the corresponding ratios in the pie chart that summarized their close readings. if the blue (metaphysics) had the highest percentage in the pie chart, consequently the predominant color in the drawing should be blue, and so on. although the most prominent color in the drawing is blue, the most visible figure is the serpent that allegorically represents nature. the snake divides the illustration in two equal parts. moreover, it rises from the lowest corner on the left, representing the base of urban culture. at the same time, it tries with all its strength to reach the highest point on the right, which represents not only the sky but also the deceased laura. similarly important is the hand that comes out the serpent’s mouth. this allegory was chosen to represent the idea of becoming human, the ongoing metamorphosis of the poet deeply rooted in earth and nature and at the same time attempting to reach the metaphysical dimension indicated by the sky, where, in the final part of the rvf, he imagines the deceased laura rests. the elevation towards the sky is triggered by the dialogue with nature and made possible by the force of poetry, mostly represented by the net that traps the hand of the serpent. this part of the drawing represents the verse “in rete accolgo l’aura, e ’n ghiaccio i fiori” (239, 37) that is transcribed in the drawing itself. it is possible to partially see them by clicking on fig. 8 and enlarging it. visibly, the net is trying to capture the hand of the serpent and is at the same time projected towards the sky. it represents an important portion of the rvf in which the poet, after the death of laura, tries to reach heaven through visions, dreams and poems. it is important to note that, although the hand, and thus the human part of the poet, never reaches the upper right corner, the verses penetrate the clouds and eventually ascend into heaven. this concept refers mostly to the verse “nulla al mondo è che non possano i versi” (239, 28). humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 81 a peculiar aspect of the colors used in the drawing is that the verse “voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono” (1, 1), the very first line of the entire rvf, included in the lower part of the picture as a symbol of the poet, should have been colored completely in red. nonetheless, by attentively observing the drawing, one notices that the full verse is not written with normal characters, but rather represented as entwined with the knot and the serpent. there is a reason why these three components are eventually combined into one. this representation is the fruit of a question that recurred throughout the course: “can one actually separate these three elements (poet, laura, nature) in petrarca’s rvf?”. all the students agreed that to obtain a reliable picture of the entire rvf, and not just part of it, we have to consider all these features not only independently, but also as a whole. in other words, without the figure of laura the rvf would lose its original meaning; at the same time, as we realized through the encoding of the poems, the omission of elements, such as the nature or the poet himself, leads to an incomplete picture of petrarca’s masterpiece. furthermore, we noticed that from each word sprout leaves. they are not just leaves, they are laurel leaves, and thus clearly refer to a constant allegory that petrarca emphasizes with “alloro/laura”. for this reason, the color, or colors, used are a combination of red, pink, and green. red because the verse is one of the two symbols chosen for the poet (together with the knot), green because the laurel is a natural element connected to both the poet and laura, and finally pink because the laurel is laura and petrarca’s verses are mostly, but not exclusively, inspired by her. it is possible to apply these criteria also for the color of the sky and the clouds. as we can see, both clouds and sky are predominantly blue, but also with undertones of pink. in summary, the visual interpretation elaborated by our class emphasized the active role of the main protagonists of the rvf while at the same time pointing to petrarca’s humanism conceived as centered on the metamorphic process of becoming human through deep involvement with the natural vital forces of natura parens. grifo’s miniatures centered on the garden and the serpent, both of which play an important role until the very last poems, in part triggered this interpretation. even in poem 366 the canzone alla vergine, the garden still represents the necessary context of a projection toward eternity. while this poem affirms the power of poetry, it shows at the same time the poet’s awareness of its transient status as language involved in the process of mutabilitas. conclusion in looking for a synthetic digital reading that would utilize the copiousness and the structure of the textualities available in the hypertext project opob our class rejected both the monographic and encyclopedic ideas of collecting data and developed a reading strategy based on five circumscribed themes, organic inner parts of the rvf and central enough to be a point of departure for an oriented encoding and close reading of selected individual poems. the close reading and encoding activities were then conceived as a premise for a distant reading of the rvf as a whole. if it is true that in order to achieve a major work of synthesis, “it is imperative to locate a point of departure (ansatzpunkt), a handle, as it were, by which the subject can be sized” (auerbach 14); it is also true that a philological and historical synthesis cannot end in “the complacent exultation of the particular” and must remain “stirred by the movement of the whole.” yet, as auerbach concludes in his essay on “philology and weltliteratur,” the movement from the particular to the whole can be “discovered in its purity only when all the particulars that humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 82 make it up are grasped as essences” (16). in other words, the relational nature of the part is reinforced through the distance/difference existing among different particulars. in this perspective the relativization of the parts transforms each of them as separate units in a mirror in which all the others reflect themselves. the reciprocal relation among all the units creates the comprehensive whole in which all of them partakes in different ways. ultimately, these units work as liebniz’ monads: each of them is unique and has at the same time the power of representation, by which it reflects all other monads in such a way that a seeing eye could, by looking into one monad, observe the whole mirrored therein (monadology, 56). the following scaled visualization of the thematic network elaborated by our class allows such a simultaneous and comprehensive synthesis. figure 9overall course scaled intersecting spheres our point of departure was found by considering the independence and autonomy of the individual poems. digital close reading and encoding led us to identify their provisional discrete grouping in five major themes; these themes became the point of departure of an articulated reading strategy that privileged the active forces in the poems, the protagonists, the natural and historical settings, along with the metaphysical culture of petrarca. as suggested by kate singer, in her article on digital close reading: tei for teaching poetic vocabularies, digital encoding was used in the classroom both as a method of teaching close reading and as a technology that helped to reconsider and challenge the terminology used in literary reading. by color-coding our readings we learned to develop interpretative language beyond the discursive and rhetorical terminology that somehow has become unable to register the synthesizing, visualizing, and outlining needs of reading in our digital time. the statistics of the thematic network created through encoding keywords and terms allowed a first visualization that revealed the qualitative and quantitative relation among the different protagonists of the rvf. from this point of departure, we were able to conceive a distant reading that provided us with a comprehensive view of the rvf based on the quantitative data of the thematic keywords extrapolated from all the poems in the collection. the statistical difference between close and distant reading revealed that while the distant reading produced results in line with those of traditional criticism, the close https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/digital-close-reading-tei-for-teaching-poetic-vocabularies/ humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 83 reading via encoding triggered instead an interpretation of the rvf conceived not as a static and finished reality around the subjectivities of the poet and laura but rather as a relational structure in which all the parts are mirroring each other in multiple perspectives.  our experience suggests that new methodologies and strategies made possible by the digital humanities, such as digital encoding and structurally prepared intertextual readings, may well help change our understanding of classic texts and offer new ways of reaching traditional goals in the humanities. the parallel reading of historical documents and editions of the poems along with the miniatures of the incunabulum queriniano enriched the students’ reading and encoding of the texts in question. finally, drawing on the historical and quantitative synthesis the class elaborated an esthetic interpretation that visualized the importance of the different themes while at the same time attesting to their interdependence in a projected symbolic whole. the ansatzpunkt of this synthesis was the result of personal intuition triggered by exposure to different textualities and nurtured by close and distant reading along with digital encoding, a mixture of art and science that inspired to the final drawing representing the idea of metamorphosis as the synthesizing principle, and at the same time maintains the value of all the interdependent themes we detected in the rvf. the digital reading produced by our class was the result of intense work, dialogues and discussions in which each individual and each group was a protagonist. the teacher had his own story to tell based on his ongoing research on the role of nature in petrarca’s poems. he was open to listening to all the other stories the students were inspired by their interaction with the material to tell. how many stories and readings of the rvf were there in the class? at least five, one for each of the themes we considered and expressed at first in the drawing of the intersecting circles that include the main protagonist of petrarca’s rvf (fig. 1). those intersecting circles triggered students’ interests in finding new themes and new relations among the different themes. on the one hand, some students were interested in studying the authorial voice of petrarca and the role of laura in the rvf. on the other hand, some students were interested in studying how petrarca’s metaphysical culture inspires his poems. other students developed an interest in studying petrarca’s relation to cities, urban and historical culture more generally. the class took in all these stories as they unfolded in our weekly meetings, in which each group had to present its close reading and encoding. in this way we rejected the idea that meaning is embedded solely in the text and avoided what is called textualism in favor of openness to reader response and to different textualities and intersemiotic renderings available in the hypertext opob. reading in our class was conceived as an activity that combined individual and group work. the semantic encoding of the poems allowed us to ponder that the meaning of the poems rather than being simply imbedded in formal features is the result of the reader’s interpretive strategy. to work in groups allowed the class to maximize the value of interpretive communities in looking for some agreement on the different meanings of texts. thus, the most innovative results are related precisely to the group and collective dimension of our experiment. our digital reading and interpretation does not pretend or want to be “exemplary,” since we believe that each act of reading is in some way always singular, original, and sui generis. in this perspective our encoding is not meant to introduce a fixed and stable layer to the text. as buzzetti and mcgann write, “to approach textuality in this way [that is, as susceptible to a definitive reading] is to approach it in illusion.” they go on the say that “markup should be humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 84 conceived, instead, as the expression of a highly reflexive act, a mapping of text back onto itself;” and that “as soon as a (marked) text is (re) marked, the metamarkings open themselves to indeterminacy. “(buzzetti and mcgann 2006, par. 49). it is clear that in this perspective quantitative reading can only be a tool of a digital reading of literary texts. our reading and encoding may be considered as a groundwork for other layers of encoding that will be introduced in the near future in the opob. all acts of interpretation occur in some context or other; our context is the late print time or digital era in western capitalist society in which there is an unprecedented abundance of textualities and images that we need to learn to master in order to preserve the cultural memory of the past while pursuing at the same time the humanist project in original ways. to this goal digital close reading, encoding and visualization may become fundamental tools available to an ethical reader aware that reading is not simply a cognitive and epistemological matter and that the new nature of reading in the digital era is characterized not only by hyper and pervasive attention but also by a deep involvement with the text. critics like j. hillis miller have promoted the notion of ethics of reading books and the importance of prosopoeias. some of his ideas were reflected in our experience. he writes, “you can never be sure what is going to happen when someone in a particular situation reads a particular book,” and that “reading is always the disconfirmation or modification of presupposed literary theory rather than its confirmation.” (21) reading in a digital context can be even more intricate, especially when you read with someone else and have to listen not only to the story supposedly told in the book but also to the stories told by other readers and editors of the text, even including the story told by the machine via a distant reading. from a theoretical point of view, our approach to reading and encoding the poems of the rvf resisted both the quantitative and doxographic reduction of theory based on statistics and taxonomy of theoretical schools, in favor of a theoretical inquiry based on wonder in which there are still opportunities for the individual to tell his/her own story. works cited auerbach, erich. “philologie der weltliteratur" (1952). trans. edward said and marie said. “philology and weltliteratur.” centennial review 13 (1969): 1-17. print. buzzetti, dino and jerome mcgann. “critical editing in a digital horizon.” electronic textual editing. eds. by lou burnard, katherine o’brien o’keeffe, and john unsworth. new york: the modern language association of america, 2006. 53-73. web. october 23, 2014. http://www.tei c.org/about/archive_new/ete/preview/mcgann.xml. canova, giordana mariani. "antonio grifo illustratore del petrarca queriniano." illustrazione libraria, filologia ed esegesi petrarchesta tra quattrocento e cinquecento. antonio grifo e l'incunabolo queriniano g v 15. ed. giuseppe frasso, giordana mariani canova, ennio sandal. padova: antenore, 1990. 147-200. print. chance, jane. the genius figure in antiquity and the middle ages. new york: columbia university press, 1975. print. cossutta, fabio. "il maestro queriniano interprete del petrarca." critica letteraria xxvi (1998): 419-48. print. donati, lamberto “appunti di biblioiconologia (del petrarca queriniano, venezia 1470).” in miscellanea di scritti di bibliografia ed erudizione in memoria di l. ferrari, 249-52. firenze: olschki, 1952. print. http://www.tei-c.org/about/archive_new/ete/preview/mcgann.xml http://www.tei-c.org/about/archive_new/ete/preview/mcgann.xml humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 85 fish, stanley eugene. “the digital humanities and the transcending of mortality.” opinionator, new york times. 09 jan. 2012. web. 02 feb. 2013. ---. “mind your p’s and b’s: the digital humanities and interpretation.” opinionator. new york times. 23 jan. 2012. web. 02 feb.2013. ---. is there a text in this class? the authority of interpretive communities. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press, 1980. print. folena goldolin, daniela. "petrarca e il medioevo latino." quaderni petrarcheschi (1996): 459-87. print. frasso, giuseppe. "antonio grifo postillatore dell'incunabolo queriniano g v 15." illustrazione libraria, filologia ed esegesi petrarchesta tra quattrocento e cinquecento. 19-145. print. gentile, sebastiano. "le postille del petrarca al ‘timeo’ latino." quaderni petrarcheschi. ix-x (1992-1993): 129-39. print. hall, james. dictionary of subjects and symbols in art. boulder: westview press, 2008. print. leibniz, gottfried wilhelm, and robert latta. the monadology. raleigh, n.c.: alex catalogue, n.d. ebook collection (ebscohost). web. 6 nov. 2014. lovejoy, arthur o. the great chain of being; a study of the history of an idea. new york: harper & row, 1960. print. miller, j. hillis. versions of pygmalion. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press, 1990. print. petrarca, francesco, and giuseppe savoca. rerum vulgarium fragmenta. firenze: l. s. olschki, 2008. print. petrarca, francesco, and robert m. durling. petrarch's lyric poems: the rime sparse and other lyrics. cambridge, mass: harvard university press, 1976. print. petrarca, francesco, bernardo lapini, francesco filelfo, nicolò peranzone, tempo a. da, gregorio . gregori, and francesco petrarca. petrarcha: con doi commenti sopra li sonetti et canzone. milano: ioanne angelo scinzenzeler, 1507. print. singer, kate. “digital close reading: tei for teaching poetic vocabularies.” n.p., n.d. web. november 10, 2014. http://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/digital-close-reading-tei-for-teachingpoetic-vocabularies/ http://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/digital-close-reading-tei-for-teaching-poetic-vocabularies/ http://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/digital-close-reading-tei-for-teaching-poetic-vocabularies/ humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 86 appendix 1 example of tei encoding: poem 21, completed by adrian leon. we include first the color code: 21 mille fiate o dolce mia guerrera per aver co’ begli occhi vostri pace v’aggio proferto il cor. m’a voi non piace mirar sì basso colla mente altera. et se di lui fors’altra donna spera, vive in speranza debile et fallace. mio perché sdegno ciò ch’a voi dispiace esser non può giamai così com’era. or s’io lo scaccio, et e’ non trova in voi ne l’exilio infelice alcun soccorso, né sa star sol, né gire ov’altri il chiama, poria smarrire il suo natural corso. che grave colpa fia d’ambeduo noi, et tanto più de voi, quanto più v’ama. tei code: </lg></div2> <div2 type="poem"> <head>21</head> <lg type="sonnet"><lg type="quatrain"> <l>mille fïate, o <rs type="laura">dolce mia guerrera</rs></l> <l>per aver co' <rs type="laura">begli occhi </rs> vostri <seg ana="metaphysics">pace</seg> </l> <l>v' aggio proferto il <rs type="laura">cor</rs>. m’a voi non piace</l> <l>mirar sí basso colla mente <rs type="laura">altera</rs>.</l> </lg><lg type="quatrain"><l>et se <rs type="poet">di lui</rs> fors' altra donna spera,</l> <l>vive in <seg ana="metaphysics">speranza</seg> debile et fallace.</l> <l><rs type="poet">mio perché sdegno</rs> ciò ch' a voi dispiace</l> <l>esser non può già mai <rs type="poet">cosí com' era</rs>.</l> </lg><lg type="tercet"><l><rs type="poet">or s' io lo scaccio</rs>, et e' non trova in voi</l> humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 87 <l>ne l' exilio infelice alcun soccorso,</l> <l><rs type="poet">né sa star sol, né gire ov' altri il chiama</rs>,</l> </lg><lg type="tercet"><l>poria smarrire il suo <seg an="metaphysics">natural corso</seg>.</l> <l>che grave colpa fia <rs type="laura">d' ambeduo noi</rs>,</l> <l><rs type="laura">et tanto piú de voi</rs>, <rs type="poet">quanto piú v' ama</rs>.</l> </lg> humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 88 appendix 2 the statistics of the thematic distant reading poem by poem. poem # nature mphys poet mphos laura urban 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 0 1 0 2 2 2 3 1 1 6 0 0 0 0 2 0 1 0 2 0 0 22 17 1 0 2 0 7 2 19 0 1 1 3 4 2 5 4 0 0 3 1 3 8 1 3 4 5 3 6 3 3 4 5 1 5 1 4 3 2 2 13 24 4 3 2 0 22 8 16 5 2 1 2 1 4 21 5 4 4 7 1 4 0 5 6 0 1 1 2 5 8 1 4 5 1 6 7 3 4 12 10 59 3 3 1 0 6 19 11 1 4 2 2 6 9 45 6 7 5 1 1 3 1 0 3 2 4 1 2 4 3 1 2 0 2 2 9 3 1 1 33 27 1 2 1 0 11 8 14 5 2 1 3 2 2 15 2 2 1 0 2 6 3 2 7 1 5 7 3 7 3 9 5 3 3 6 7 5 2 5 7 33 3 2 2 3 17 22 25 6 2 2 3 3 3 29 2 2 1 0 1 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 89 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 1 1 1 1 3 2 2 3 0 9 0 2 5 3 2 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 4 1 24 3 1 2 4 0 5 5 1 2 0 1 0 1 2 0 2 0 0 0 0 3 1 3 1 3 2 4 1 1 11 1 0 17 1 2 3 4 4 3 3 4 5 2 0 6 13 2 3 3 9 1 13 16 2 3 1 1 3 2 4 3 1 1 3 2 4 1 0 3 1 4 4 8 0 8 12 6 1 11 4 6 7 2 5 8 4 8 5 3 0 6 7 2 2 3 21 7 34 40 4 5 5 3 4 7 17 14 5 7 1 4 4 4 3 3 1 0 1 6 1 1 9 3 2 5 2 2 3 2 1 2 3 3 2 5 0 2 3 2 3 0 6 2 13 16 2 1 1 1 1 5 15 0 0 1 1 4 3 3 2 4 2 4 2 6 6 2 13 5 1 10 3 8 1 5 1 7 4 8 3 6 4 2 4 2 1 1 9 4 19 24 3 8 3 5 3 7 3 0 3 2 3 7 3 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 7 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 90 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 2 2 0 0 0 2 6 2 4 2 5 1 0 1 3 1 0 2 3 0 3 0 2 1 1 1 12 9 11 9 15 0 0 1 1 3 1 4 4 3 2 0 4 1 4 2 2 3 3 1 4 2 10 3 2 1 0 2 3 2 1 3 3 1 1 2 21 2 2 1 1 3 5 6 14 19 13 4 1 3 4 6 4 1 3 5 7 3 6 8 6 1 1 4 4 3 5 4 33 5 8 5 3 8 7 5 6 6 4 5 4 9 49 8 1 6 3 7 19 11 48 17 18 3 2 10 1 3 2 4 3 2 1 2 3 1 2 1 1 3 1 0 2 0 8 3 4 3 3 2 2 2 4 4 1 2 1 3 19 1 0 3 0 2 4 5 21 11 12 2 1 1 4 4 3 5 9 2 4 2 5 5 6 1 1 6 4 1 3 2 17 3 3 3 8 4 6 3 9 3 3 8 5 3 37 0 3 4 4 3 20 22 34 14 23 3 3 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 91 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 4 2 12 2 1 0 2 0 0 24 1 2 7 0 1 6 0 2 1 0 2 3 0 5 1 0 3 2 2 8 0 3 3 2 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 6 1 1 7 5 23 3 5 1 3 1 3 14 0 4 1 4 1 3 3 0 2 0 5 3 3 5 1 3 2 1 2 3 3 7 4 2 4 2 1 2 0 3 1 2 8 4 3 5 6 11 28 0 7 1 4 4 6 5 8 3 3 4 2 2 4 5 7 10 3 0 4 3 1 2 3 3 4 2 9 10 3 3 7 13 4 14 11 10 1 6 9 6 4 6 8 4 26 1 2 0 0 0 5 28 1 2 3 3 1 2 2 0 2 2 4 5 0 4 2 3 2 3 1 4 5 4 5 1 4 2 1 3 0 3 0 3 6 3 3 3 13 4 24 1 2 0 2 3 6 8 9 5 1 7 5 4 5 10 5 6 4 5 2 3 4 8 13 6 6 8 5 7 7 1 7 5 7 6 4 5 3 7 7 5 3 3 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 92 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 0 4 2 2 1 2 3 1 0 4 3 4 2 4 1 3 3 2 3 1 1 0 0 2 1 0 0 3 8 6 0 1 1 3 0 3 2 3 3 8 2 2 0 0 5 2 2 2 2 2 3 1 2 3 2 10 1 3 2 1 4 3 3 2 3 2 6 2 2 3 1 2 2 7 13 4 1 3 0 5 2 4 0 7 2 6 1 4 2 4 3 1 4 1 0 2 5 2 1 6 2 5 3 4 3 1 2 6 6 0 4 4 4 1 6 7 11 3 6 15 38 1 8 2 8 2 0 13 1 7 7 3 3 3 8 3 4 2 3 5 2 5 3 2 2 3 2 5 2 4 2 3 2 4 5 3 3 5 3 2 2 3 1 2 1 6 19 4 0 3 0 8 0 11 4 6 3 5 5 2 1 4 11 0 6 2 5 5 8 7 5 2 4 9 2 4 7 5 5 4 8 7 11 5 3 6 3 7 11 3 18 18 19 7 3 4 6 6 4 6 4 3 7 6 2 7 5 8 7 5 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 93 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 0 2 1 3 0 3 1 0 1 0 4 1 25 1 18 0 1 1 3 0 0 2 1 2 0 1 1 1 0 1 3 1 2 1 4 1 0 0 0 3 2 2 0 4 2 11 4 6 1 2 1 6 9 1 4 1 1 4 5 1 11 1 13 4 3 11 2 6 1 6 1 1 3 4 2 4 2 1 3 1 2 2 5 3 2 29 4 3 4 12 3 22 2 5 5 1 5 4 7 0 8 7 6 7 10 1 13 10 1 6 3 7 0 3 3 4 5 3 3 5 6 16 1 6 2 3 10 2 4 3 3 39 3 15 4 30 7 33 3 5 3 0 1 4 3 2 2 2 1 0 23 11 11 2 1 3 0 1 2 5 1 4 2 1 4 3 3 4 3 2 3 1 2 1 0 4 1 22 4 2 3 12 3 20 1 5 3 5 4 4 2 1 5 1 1 7 10 3 24 4 5 6 5 4 4 9 4 8 3 4 4 4 6 5 0 8 4 3 5 5 6 5 4 23 4 7 7 28 6 35 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 94 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 3 0 2 0 1 1 1 3 4 8 5 1 0 0 1 2 0 10 0 2 3 1 0 2 0 0 0 2 0 1 6 1 6 1 4 2 2 0 0 6 3 2 3 0 1 0 3 1 3 5 3 2 3 2 3 7 3 2 2 3 3 1 2 1 3 7 2 1 1 2 2 2 4 2 3 3 2 0 4 1 3 7 4 2 7 4 2 2 2 1 4 4 4 6 2 6 6 5 1 8 6 5 4 5 10 4 3 6 5 3 5 9 8 5 11 5 3 5 2 10 5 7 7 7 3 3 4 9 10 4 4 0 8 1 5 4 8 3 2 2 1 4 4 3 9 1 3 1 3 2 3 2 2 2 4 1 2 2 2 3 1 3 2 2 1 6 5 2 1 2 2 2 3 4 2 3 3 1 4 2 7 1 3 4 8 3 4 5 4 5 3 7 5 3 5 4 6 9 6 6 2 6 8 7 5 2 2 8 5 7 6 4 7 5 4 3 2 3 6 5 5 2 4 3 3 3 6 7 5 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 95 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 0 5 1 4 2 1 16 0 15 1 2 0 0 0 6 1 4 0 1 0 6 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 2 1 0 3 4 0 1 1 0 0 8 9 3 1 2 3 3 3 5 3 18 1 24 6 5 3 0 4 16 21 5 3 4 0 4 7 5 6 5 3 2 4 0 2 3 3 1 3 2 6 3 7 4 1 6 7 15 23 3 1 3 1 2 8 5 7 8 5 26 5 6 9 7 6 24 43 6 3 1 3 5 6 3 8 7 4 5 8 6 3 4 5 8 2 3 2 2 3 2 5 7 6 21 37 7 5 1 4 3 4 8 3 15 3 15 6 7 3 5 2 14 22 2 1 0 2 2 4 3 2 4 2 2 3 1 4 3 3 1 7 1 5 5 1 6 1 6 7 7 17 1 1 4 3 3 6 5 4 18 8 33 4 14 2 2 4 17 32 3 6 5 2 6 5 5 2 6 1 4 4 4 2 6 8 2 4 1 11 2 6 4 5 2 9 20 35 5 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4 0 0 humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 96 363 364 365 366 total most 1 1 0 12 848 21 4 4 4 37 1502 22 7 7 5 29 2433 174 2 1 1 17 1361 31 4 3 2 33 2253 117 0 0 0 0 42 1 humanist studies & the digital age lollini & spagnolo 4.1 (2015) 97 appendix 3 figure 8: drawing details of fig. 8 with petrarca’s verses back to the text humanist studies & the digital age, 4.1 (2015) issn: 2158-3846 (online) http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ doi: 10.5399/uo/hsda.4.1.3634 e-philology and twitterature massimo lollini and rebecca rosenberg abstract this paper presents an original use of twitter to interpret and rewrite the poems of francesco petrarca's rerum vulgarium fragmenta (rvf) implemented within the oregon petrarch open book (opob). this activity was partially inspired by the idea of twitterature developed by alexander aciman and emmett rensin; we believe with them that our digital time should develop new and more functional ways of addressing literary texts but at the same time we are convinced that the "burdensome duty of hours spent reading" cannot be eliminated. on the contrary, the new ways of reading in the digital era as we envisage them are the result and consequence of broader and deeper reading activities. we conceived the project of writing 366 tweets, out of the 366 poems that make the last form of petrarca’s rvf, as the result of different philological activities, from reading the texts in the original language to consulting manuscripts, translations, and intersemiotic renderings of the texts. before writing the 140 characters that make one tweet we also elaborated paraphrases, summaries, and keywords related to the individual poems. students created the first version of the tweets during a 2011 university of oregon seminar on re-reading petrarca’s rvf in the digital era. the second version was elaborated in the context of a seminar on the same topic during winter 2014. this paper presents the two versions of the twitter edition of petrarca's rvf now available in the opob and focuses on the philology connected to the latest edition that provided an english translation of the original tweets written in italian. the actual in italian and english 366 tweets are published in the appendix to the article. introduction when alexander aciman and emmett rensin, then 19-year-old freshmen at the university of chicago, first published twitterature they announced a revolution in the literacy of our time by drawing an ambitious parallelism with the condition of the holy scripture at the time of martin luther. we are the martin luther of our time, they write, because – as luther understood that the classic vulgate no longer spoke to the souls of his contemporaries and translated it into the vernacular of his time, – we realize that literature cannot be proposed to the modern-day readers in the same form it has been for centuries and needs to be translated in the language and format of our time. their book twitterature published by penguin in 2009 retells some of the world's greatest books through twitter, reducing all of classic literature into a slim format of 140 characters or http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 117 less; a tweet is not simple plot summary but a sort of rewriting of certain episodes that are summarized with an ironic at times sarcastic tone. they claim that the social networking tool with its limit of 140 characters a post (including spaces) “has refined to its purest form the instant-publishing, short-attention-span, all-digital-all-the-time, self important age of info-deluge” (xv). however, from our point of view the translation process from the literature of the past into the agile twitter format as envisaged by aciman and rensin appears to be too fast and lacking the necessary philological attention that should not disappear in our digital era if we still want to find nourishment in the classics of all times. in twitterature, they summarize the plot of famous works, such as harper lee’s to kill a mockingbird, dante’s inferno, j.d. salinger’s catcher in the rye, and jack kerouac’s on the road, among others, by recreating them in approximately twenty tweets. here are a few examples of tweets from dante’s inferno: l'm having a midlife crisis. lost in the woods. should have brought my iphone. (…) satan has three heads, and they are totally eating dudes. the best solution is to climb his big frozen ass. l'm still gonna die. *sighs* :( made it. see you nerds later! beatrice shall soon make up for a lifetime of my desperate, torrid moods. gonna make looovvveeeeeee 2 ya girrrrrllll. dante out. i have to climb a mountain now? you got to be kidding me. ls this a joke? who the hell came up with this story? viiirrrgggilllllllllll! (aciman-rensin 38-39) in these tweets the engagement with the literary text is minimal, mostly at the plot level that is then altered to introduce side comments in the colloquial slang of contemporary youth that eventually follows the typographic features of a smart phone text message. the contrast between the original text that aciman and rensin probably had to read at least in the cliffs notes version provokes no more than some laughs and entertainment in the presumably acculturated reader. in this process, dante’s inferno is definitely forgotten and supplanted by a new form of literary divertissement that does not believe in the power of the classic literature to cultivate contemporary readers. even though their operation is performed in the name of the reader what really counts in aciman’s and rensin’s tweets is their re-writing that ends up erasing the original text. humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 118 on the other hand, the book by aciman and rensin had the merit of drawing attention of the internet users of all kinds to some of the possibilities opened up by twitter for literary studies. it started a phenomenon that has pedagogic and aesthetic potential even in the academic world. the book came out when the curators of the oregon petrarch open book (opob) were debating the pedagogical usefulness of introducing in the hypertext we are constructing around petrarca’s rvf an educational apparatus that would facilitate the reading of the original poems written by petrarca in the italian of the fourteenth century. our plan was to introduce paraphrases, summaries and key words for each poem. in our vision the writing of such apparatuses had to follow a philological strategy that would have students and contributors to the site read the text in the original and eventually in translation, and then produce in sequence the paraphrase, the summary, and the key words. in this perspective it became natural to add to the list of our apparatuses a twitter edition of petrarca’s rvf. the idea of translating petrarca’s rvf into twitterature was developed and implemented for the first time during a seminar on re-reading petrarca’s rvf in the digital era taught at the university of oregon in winter 2011. this class created the first twitter edition of petrarca's rvf in italian and focused mostly on the italian text; students of another seminar on the same topic taught three years later reelaborated the original tweets written in italian and provided an english translation of them. both versions are now available in the opob. 1. tweet philology, hermeneutics, pedagogy and beyond the most important challenge that the 2011 seminar had to face was the production of pedagogical apparatuses that would facilitate the comprehension of rvf and the creation of the tweets that in our vision had to have primarily a hermeneutic function. the six undergraduate and the four graduate students that made this seminar were motivated to perform this important task for three important reasons. first, as advanced students of italian, they felt that by creating paraphrases, summaries, key words and tweets for each poem they were improving immensely their knowledge of the language; second, they sought to progressively develop a comprehensive grasp of the individual poems and of the collection as a whole; finally, by actively engaging with the rvf, they intended to incarnate the figure of the wreader popularized by george landow, becoming active readers and contributors to the creation of the hypertext around petrarca rvf. (landow hypertext 4-5; hyper/text/theory 14). the instructor provided the general introduction to the rvf and presented in each class a narrative account of the sequence of poems assigned.1 he divided the class in three groups and coordinated their works performed both in and outside the class; his assistant, cinzia capon, helped the students write the paraphrases and provided an edited version of them for each poem.2 1 as a biographical introduction to petrarca students read a selection of the rerum familiarium libri (letters on familiar matters); and as philosophical introduction to the rvf, students read petrarca’s de sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia (on his own ignorance). for the general pedagogical concerns of the course see lollini’s article on “petrarch and the ethics of writing and reading.” 2 the instructor could afford having a teaching assistant thanks to a 2010 neh digital humanities award. humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 119 the students had to read all the poems but concentrated their weekly work as wreaders on the poems assigned to their group. after reading the original text and the paraphrases the different groups had to provide the summaries, keywords and tweets for the poems assigned. it was clear from the start that the sequence of philological and writing activities represented an exceptional tool for reading and comprehending the text. one could argue that this way of “reading” somehow regenerated a reading practice that originated in the early middle ages when people started to read in order to write, and to write in order to be read, as it happened in the compilatio, the method of composition of scholasticism. as for the early medieval readers described by cavallo and chartier for us reading was not exclusively aimed at a simple comprehension of the literal meaning (littera) of writing. this first stage consisted of a movement from the original text to the paraphrase. this initial comprehension was followed by the composition of the summary of the general meaning (sensus) of the poem. finally, the individuation of the keywords and the writing of the tweet allowed the students to arrive at a proposition that more nearly captures the profundity of the poem (sententia) (cavallo and chartier 18). each group shared the work done in class so that all the students were learning from each other and participating in a collective endeavor. we discussed at the beginning of the seminar the general tone of the tweets. after a few experiments of various kinds we decided to use in our tweets the first person, to favor an emphatic engagement with the meaning that the author had presumably in mind and to avoid ironic and sarcastic rendering of his voice. in other words, we used the tweet as a creative interpretive tool, something different from the summary and the collection of keywords; ultimately, in our view the tweet had to extrapolate the quintessential element of each poem allowing an immediate and insightful grasp of it. at the end of the course during one memorable session in the yamada language center at the university of oregon the students alternately read all the 366 tweets edited by the instructor. it was impressive to witness the lively and active reading of the long sequence of tweets that translated one of the masterpieces of western literature in a format and a language attuned to our contemporary ears. in the general discussion that followed the reading, most students appreciated the sense of continuity from one tweet to the other and the comprehensiveness of our interpretative reading that allowed a complete review of the entire rvf in just three hours. the consecutive reading of all the 366 tweets gave them a sense of the entire rvf better than the one possible through an anthology of poems selected by the instructor. elena cull, a graduate student in the course and a writer herself embraced with passion her role of wreader and the interactive learning that the class prompted. she was particularly enthusiastic about her first tweet from poem 1 of the rvf. when she first read the poem, “voi ch'ascoltate in rime sparse il suono/di quei sospiri ond'io nudriva 'l core…” she was deeply touched; she felt that a door was opening and that she was about to meet a real human being with his dreams, hopes and sorrows. this first meeting with the poet induced elena to conceive the tweet to give expression to his voice and to update his language so that contemporary ears could still hear his message: humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 120 ehi! voi ricordate com’era essere giovani e innamorati? abbiate pietà di me! ora mi vergogno e capisco che il mondo è transitorio. in the final discussion of the class she emphasized the benefits of rewriting the text in different formats, the discipline of the mind necessary to learn a language while interacting with a great work of literature. other members of the seminar, antonio schiavulli and michael lukomski, noted this point as well, underlining the importance of removing the separation between the pedagogical-linguistic elements and the literary dimension of the course. the language, in this way, they added, had not been an ancillary foundation of the literary work: from the start and for the entire duration of the course both the linguistic and literary dimensions interacted in an interdependent relationship, based on a mechanism of understanding and creating, reading and (re) writing. schiavulli was particularly fond of the creative dimension of the new text, the tweet, as different from the original text in form and content. his tweet from poem 1 was slightly different from elena’s: la giovanile ingenuità con cui ho affrontato l’amore ha prodotto questi versi. ora, da uomo maturo, comprendo il valore profondo delle cose. gail gould, a graduate student in the class, further elaborated these ideas by stating that the sequence of philological activities required to read a poem allowed entering the linguistic process at the origin of the poem itself, revealing some of its deep and hidden strata. in the final discussion of the class she presented on the difficulties and rewards of writing a tweet out of a very long poem of 157 verses such as canzone 360. in this song the poet summons the sweet and cruel love in front of the court of reason. petrarca presents himself as an innocent victim, persecuted for a long time by the love passion, and describes his unhappy life under this merciless master. he accuses love of having turned him away from god because of a woman, and considers it responsible for his suffering. love responds by reversing the charges. petrarca is guilty of failing to take a great opportunity that had been given to him: to imitate the perfection of laura and rise to heaven with his poetry. at the moment of the verdict the personified reason takes time: the issue is too complicated, and cannot be easily resolved. certainly, such a paraphrastic summary of the poem does not do justice to the rhythm and many beautiful poetic nuances of petrarca’s marvellous poem. however, the tweet that gail helped to write captures the poetic truth, the sententia that is at the core of the poem: nel processo contro amore, io ero il testimone di tante sofferenze. amore si è difeso e la ragione non ha saputo giudicare. nicolò potesio, an undergraduate student majoring in science, took the course on petrarca’s rvf because he wanted to experience at least one literature course during his college years. in his comments on the class he wrote that composing a tweet was for him fundamental in approaching the world of poetry, which for him was an unknown territory up to that point. he perceived a greater understanding of the poems for which he wrote a summary and a tweet. he admitted consulting not only the original text and paraphrases but also translations before writing the summary and the actual tweet. his choice of humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 121 which aspect of the poem to include in the tweet was related in many cases to the structure of the sonnet that is divided in a “fronte” in which the poet introduces the theme of the poem, and in a “sirma” where the poet draws his conclusion or final reflection on the proposed theme. quite often the clue for the tweet was located precisely in the sirma as nicolò wanted to achieve an emphatic interpretation, writing in the first person and giving voice directly to the poet. he found particularly useful the tweet he wrote for poem 19 where the poet compares himself to a moth drawn to the fire that burns. for petrarca it is impossible to escape the love for laura in spite of its having a negative effect. like the moths the poet cannot withdraw; he is bound to be drawn to his flame forever, even when it burns. compared to the original poem much is absent in the summary and in the tweet. nicolò decided to omit the discussion in the first quatrain of the different types of animals, focusing on the butterfly for the well-known tendency of these insects to be attracted to the light; he also omitted any part of the first tercet because it was redundant. he included in the tweet the problem (the fire is attractive, but it burns) and resolution announced in the final tercet of the sirma (it is his destiny to be burned). this tweet is therefore nicolò’s interpretation of the proposition and of the tone presented by the poet in this poem: sono una farfalla attratta dalla sua fiamma, incapace di allontanarmi anche quando mi brucia. è mio destino andare dietro a ciò che mi arde. robert belmonte an undergraduate student of renaissance literature wrote that in the classes he took in the past while studying the texts of the italian renaissance he felt disconnected from the poetic work. for him to go through the same creative process as the author has done to write his poems helps students to develop their literary skills as a whole. one of his favorite tweets is the one from the poem 358 where the poet associates the death of laura to that of christ. petrarca is now waiting for death and invokes its arrival because his life has already ended with the death of laura. morte, la tua venuta è dolce, devo superare questa tristezza e l'unica cura sei tu. the tweet helped robert not only to understand the poem but also to contextualize it in relation to the others in the sequence and grasp the crucial importance of the death theme for the second part of the rvf. emily anger derived the shortest tweet from poem 138, an invective against the pope of avignon, a city deemed by the poet to be false and evil in opposition to virtuous rome. the church for petrarca has become a brazen harlot who rebels against christ and the apostles. the tweet gives a very succint and clear idea of the invective: ah! inferno babilonese! the class discussion elaborated and enriched the tweet that now reads like this in the opob web site: humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 122 o inferno babilonese! la sede papale è una meretrice sfacciata che genera il male. perché costantino non torna a revocare la sua donazione? for cameron butler it was very important to read petrarch letters and his philosophical work on his ignorance to understand the poems of the rvf. moreover, the philological activity performed in the class helped him to appreciate the great value of petrarca’s poetry and above all what cameron considers his unsurpassed ability to express emotions. to learn how to understand and select the data necessary to write a tweet was one of the most satisfactory parts of the course for cameron; he learned to distinguish between the most important rhetorical elements of poetry and prose, and synthesize them into one unified idea. his favorite tweet was based on poem 313 where the poet laments the death of laura and cries. he states that she took his heart and brought it with her in heaven. finally, the poet adds that he would like to be dead, to be near her. cameron’s tweet captures in three brief sentences the core idea of the poem: la morte di laura mi fa piangere. ha portato con sé il mio cuore e la mia anima. vorrei essere morto. butler was very proud of the work done in this course. in the final reflection on the class he wrote that the rewriting of petrarca’s poems in tweet format makes it possible for them to continue living, evolving and remaining relevant to modern and classical poetry. cameron is convinced that the knid of work done in class and now available in the opob helps the reader not only to understand poetry in the rvf, but also to acquire an insightful method to approch poetry in general, the poetry of the world. andrea dekonig, in her comments wrote that reading the 366 tweets helped her to understand that there is a dramatic force in the rvf showing a journey of discovery and transformation through the love for laura. petrarca’s daily feelings and desires are very relevant and the long sequence of tweets help to provide a continuous and unique perception of petrarca’s masterpiece. andrea’s favorite tweet responds to poem 133, in which petrarca feels dominated by the passion of love from which he can not escape. love dazzles him and destroys his life that flees away before laura’s angelic song and breath: non ho alcuna difesa contro le armi di laura che conquista la mia vita. io sono un bersaglio per amore e ho bisogno di misericordia. andrea’s tweet has been slightly modified in the actual version in the opob, which includes direct quotes from the original in the attempt at capturing petrarca’s poetic style: amore mi ha trasformato in un bersaglio, come neve al sole, come cera al fuoco. la mia vita fugge senza scampo alla tua dolce aura. finally, brandy freeman’s favorite tweet took inspiration from poem 15. this was the first poem by petrarca that really struck her. the poet is traveling away from his beloved and reflects on the impossibility of the physical body to live separated from the spirit humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 123 represented by laura, who has remained in her hometown. love reminds the poet that lovers are exempt from physical rules that usually govern human beings and so the body and spirit can exist in separate states. the resulting suffering is described very vividly and dramatically by petrarca, who feels he is leaving behind a piece of his soul. here is brandy’s rendering of the poet’s drama: mi domando come sia possibile sopravvivere senza lo spirito che mi anima, ma è un dolore che ogni uomo innamorato deve provare. in the final discussion and in their written comments all the students in the class were convinced that the reading of the tweet cannot substitute for a reading of the actual poem; they would recommend the reader of the opob to read the tweet after having read the poem itself. conversely, the reading of the tweet should trigger an engagement with the original text. also, they suggest that occasional readers of poetry use the tweets as a reference tool to acquire a basic knowledge of the rvf. nevertheless, the instructor’s basic criterion for editing the tweets created in this course suggests a greater role for the tweet, beyond its use as a hermeneutic and reference tool. this criterion is illustrated by the above-mentioned tweet from poem 133: including direct or indirect quotes from the original in the attempt at capturing petrarca’s poetic style. in this perspective the tweet incorporates a poetic flavor in what otherwise would remain a pure prose rendering of petrarca’s rvf. the work done by the class is propedeutic for and interconnected with a complex and articulated reading of petrarca’s masterpiece in hypertext format, which is now possible to perform through the compare poems and assets tool included in the opob. the readers and students of petrarca’s rvf may now retrieve the philological experience of the class, opening in different coordinated small windows on the same web page, the original text, the paraphrase, the summary and the tweet of each poem. moreover, as we will see in the next section they may add to this basic apparatuses other important tools, which may promote an informed digital reading of petrarca rvf, like the access to original manuscripts, translations in different modern languages and a visual rendering of the poems. in other words, the opob hypertext reproduces the reading wheel that was already known to the medieval and renaissance humanist (cavallo and chartier “introduction” 29; lollini, “circles or the reader in the network”). in this wheel the tweet becomes just a component that acquires sense and value in relation to the others. 2. translation, philology and interpretation in the 2011 seminar on re-reading petrarca rvf in the digital era, students created tweets in italian for each of the 366 poems. to continue their work in the 2014 seminar on the same topic taught this time in english, a new group of students, rebecca rosenberg, michele agresta, and beau battista, took these tweets and translated them into english as their final project. the initial plan was to follow the class with the progress made in reading the rvf. each of the three groups in the class had to read 20 poems each week, for an overall total of 60 each week. the twitter group was supposed to publish 60 poems on twitter each week by utilizing the tweet publisher twuffer. this publishing software https://petrarch.uoregon.edu/multi-compare humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 124 would have allowed the members to create a publication schedule for the tweets based on desired time and date. the translation took the entire 10 weeks of the course. as they remained behind at the beginning of the course, rosenberg decided to publish each tweet by hand on twitter, not following a regular numbers of tweets per week. the process of translation was very difficult due to the strict limitation of the 140 characters and involved methodological discussion, analysis and revision of the original tweets as well. on the other hand, the difficulties triggered an exciting creative writing process. for the publication of the tweets, rosenberg, agresta, and battista took the original italian tweets and translated them into english. because the translation sometimes took more characters than the limit allowed, they had to cut some of the information originally provided. if the original italian tweet was not sufficiently clear and efficient in conveying the meaning of the poems, they referred to the resources available in the opob. in other words, in the process of translation they continued and enriched the philological work performed by the previous class. we were encouraged to perform these modifications of the original texts by the history of translation. with the exception of the bible and other sacred texts, translations from one language into another, especially translation into the vernacular, for centuries until the end of nineteenth century in europe assumed the possibility and right for the translator to alter the original text. commentaries, glosess, and translations modified the perception of the original texts in renaissance manuscripts (zali 68-69). translation is a rewriting of an original text. inevitably all rewritings, whatever their intention, reflect a certain ideology and a poetics; they “manipulate” the original texts to function in a given society in a given way (lefevere xi). modifications of the original texts in their translations included adding or cutting parts of the original. language learning represents the site at which the west has traditionally allowed liberties to be taken with translations of latin and greek texts. the classical example in this respect goes back to cicero, who, speaking of translation, addresses the big theoretical problem: should the translation be faithful to the words of the text (literal translation) or the thought contained in the text (free translation or literary)? in the translation of the speeches of demosthenes and aeschines cicero, did not behave as a simple translator, but as a writer, respecting the propositions, thoughts, and figures of the original. he used the words suited to the latin habits, while not changing the essential meaning and value of the text. the following statement from cicero’s de oratore (55bc) about his translation from greek to latin may apply to our experience in translating the italian poems and relative tweets into english: i decided to take speeches written in greek by great orators and to translate them freely, and i obtained the following results: by giving a latin form to the text i had read i could not only make use of the best expressions in common usage with us, but i could also coin new expressions, analogous to those used in greek, and they were no less well received by our people as long as they seemed appropriate (cicero de oratore, qtd. in lefevere 4 and 47). thanks to the work of the previous class in 2014 the opob allowed the next set of readers to view simultaneously the original italian text of the poem, the modern italian editions, as well as translations in english, paraphrases, summaries, or commentaries. in humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 125 this way, the members of the group were able to determine what, from their point of view, was missing in a good number of the italian tweets. therefore, they could essentially rewrite them while translating. finally, as we document in another article of this journal, besides translating the tweets, the 2014 class was encoding a limited number of petrarca’s poems and exposed to the visual interpretation of the poems of the entire collection contained in the 1470 first printed publication of the canzoniere, inc. queriniano g v 15 (lollini-spagnolo). on several occasions, the english translation of the italian tweet was confusing or not very informative. for example, the italian tweet for poem 51 states, c’è mancato poco che, all’avvicinarsi di laura, non sia rimasto di sasso. literally translated, this reads, by a narrow escape, at laura’s nearing, i was not turned to stone. rosenberg felt that this tweet did not provide enough information and that surely there was more to the poem. it was also rather difficult to translate the italian to english without some form of context. she referred to the original poem, the paraphrased version, the english translation and the summary and found that the original tweet does not capture the sense of the poem. petrarch wants to be free of passion. in order to accomplish this, he wishes he could turn into stone. the original tweet misleads the reader into thinking that petrarch does not want to turn into stone, which is the exact opposite of the poet’s intended meaning. after consulting opob, rosenberg rewrote the entire tweet to read, since i cannot become laura when she nears, i would become a statue of the hardest stone to be free from passion, as did atlas for medusa. the original tweet lacked any mythological reference that can be found in the original poem and misinterpreted petrarch’s reference to becoming a stone. besides translating and creating legible tweets, another point of importance that the group attempted to include in each tweet was grammar. although twitter is an informal form of communication, they wanted to maintain a certain degree of academic language for the manner in which they were writing. as has been identified above, aciman and rensin chose to utilize a more colloquial tone in their tweets. they do not always use proper grammar and even use acronyms in some of their tweets. the goal as a class was to remain as faithful as possible to the rvf, while still making it accessible to modern readers. rosenberg, while reading the tweets prior to publication, included the proper punctuation, including periods at the end of the tweets. only in a couple of cases did she need to omit the final period and this only because she could not find any other way to remain within the number of characters allowed by the tweet. in addition, through the analysis of the tweets, she noticed that many of the tweets in italian lacked proper grammar, used words mistakenly, or even included misspellings. to highlight these humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 126 errors, rosenberg created a document in which she included a table with all of the tweets. in the left column, she copied each of the 366 italian tweets and on the right, placed each of the english ones. then, by means of the tools provided in microsoft word, rosenberg placed comments about the different errors she had found. in order to maintain utmost clarity, she noted whether she had changed a word, added a comma, or rewrote the tweet. although grammar is important, there were other crucial considerations to keep in mind. among the numerous concerns the class had to decide whether to place emphasis on the meaning of the tweet or on the poetic musicality of the tweet as a poetic scheme. it was a challenge for the students to rewrite tweets, whether they were correcting errors or creating new ones. as a class, the students held many discussions as to the relative benefits of according greater importance to this or that aspect of the poem. as the class developed throughout the quarter, the students were asked, as part of their weekly assignments, to read the tweets rosenberg was continuously publishing, identify two, and comment on whether they liked them, whether they represented the poem in a faithful fashion, and whether they wanted to reformulate the tweet. if they wanted to rewrite the tweet, they had to do it, explain why, and include the tweet in their assignments as well as publish their revisions on twitter. this became a creative exercise for the students who at the same time were dramatically improving their linguistic and poetic competence in different languages, mostly italian and english, with one student concentrating spanish and english. those students who found the meaning of the poem to be the most important focused on the overall meaning of the poem and decided to place some of the information provided in the poem into the background. others attempted to include some information from each stanza in the tweet. if the poem was actually a song, it became rather impossible to include all of the information; therefore, students placed meaning in what they considered the sententia of the song. as for the poetic musicality of the tweet, some students wanted to remain as faithful to the poetic form as much as possible in 140 characters. at each class meeting, each student then had to present his/her tweets to the class and listen to any suggestions that others might have had. although the students only did this exercise for five of the ten weeks of the course, they analyzed numerous tweets based upon these criteria, working and reworking them like puzzles until they found the proper pattern. while the main part of the course focused on encoding the poems based on predetermined criteria, the tweets were more of an exercise in creativity and comprehension. at the same time, given that each student is unique, everyone approached the task with a different perspective, a different method for creating the tweets. occasionally, students chose to modify the same tweet, an occurrence that happened more than once. for example, jacob monzingo chose sonnet 118. his initial interest led him to reread and consider the original poem, tweet and other tools provided by opob. the original english tweet, directly translated from italian read, i have sighed for sixteen years, but my suffering continues. i have remained always the same and i do not want to change. humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 127 monzingo noted that he did not completely agree with the sententia of this tweet and wanted to slightly modify it. rather than stating that petrarch did not want to change, he altered it to read, i have sighed for sixteen years, but my suffering continues. i have always remained the same, wishing to change yet unable. by making this change, monzingo emphasizes the fact that petrarca wanted to change, but could not despite his efforts. for the same poem, pierpaolo spagnolo, on the other hand, wrote, time passes, and i am still here. i truly wish i were stronger and somewhere else, but here i am, crying, stuck and unable to change and free myself. spagnolo, too, noted petrarca’s inability to change instead of his willingness to do so. in addition, he initially noted in the original italian tweet the lack of passion and poetry. this perception guided his re-writing of the tweet in his translation. although both monzingo and spagnolo emphasize similar points, their differing approaches resulted in two completely different tweets above all in terms of poetic style. others students approached the tweets wishing to address the double meanings present in petrarca’s poems. emily letcher, one of the undergraduate students, demonstrated this desire through her rewritten tweet for sonnet 107. originally, the tweet stated, i cannot manage to escape from her eyes’ beauty and love continues to make me wander in the wood of worldly things. although originally attracted by the similarities between the tweet and the beginning of dante’s inferno as well as the tweets’ ability to portray the general message of the poem, letcher felt that the tweet misinterpreted the wood as worldly. she introduced the connection between laura and the laurel trees, a connection the original tweet misses. as a result, her final tweet reads, i cannot escape from her eyes' beauty nor turn away from their light, so i wander in the laurel wood as love leads me through its branches. by including the laurel trees, letcher emphasizes the play on words petrarch creates with the natural element and the woman he loves, “solo d’un lauro tal selva verdeggia” (rvf 107, 12). letcher also modified tweet 151, which originally read, laura’s pleasing eyes dazzle me with arrows of love, but they are the port from which my poetry is born. the imagery created by the tweet intrigued her; she then discovered that the tweet genuinely represented the poem by including the images of the arrow and the port. she only modified the tweet by changing the word “love” to “love.” in doing so, the tweet humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 128 represents not only the emotion, but also the personification of love, cupid. in that way, the arrows represent both love the personification and love the emotion. a common manner in which a number of the students analyzed the poems was through humor. petrarch’s canzoniere also possesses humorous, or playful, elements and these students wanted to include this dimension in the tweets. as an example, adrian de leon, another undergraduate student, changed the tweet for sonnet 115. the original literal translation of the italian tweet read, if laura preferred me to the sun, then perhaps i can hope in her benevolence. after rereading the poem, he found that the tweet lacked the playful aspect of the poem. due to this, he changed to reflect the humor by writing, i fought the sun for laura's attention and i won! joy rushed into me as i vanquished my noble adversary and a cloud hid his shamed sad tears. by adding this element, the tweet not only differs greatly from the original, but also reflects better the poem itself. this was not the only poem found to be humorous. beau battista found the hilarity of sonnet 152 to be intriguing. it originally read, if you continue to keep me in suspense, i will have no choice but to die. my life force is fragile and tired from such uncertainty. the timeless nature of the tweet, and therefore sonnet, spoke to him. it represents a man led on by a woman who does not return his love, a classic example of unrequited love. battista altered the tweet so it became, if you continue to keep me in suspense, i will have no choice but to die. he found the second sentence of the tweet to be repetitive and deterrent to the forcefulness of the statement, while still adhering to the melodramatic tone originally present both in the sonnet and in the tweet. overall, each of the students attempted to improve the poetic and musical quality of the tweets. poems follow rhythmic pattern and are by nature musical. as a result, the class decided that this poetic element needed to be included in the translation of the tweets. on the other hand, while improving the poetic quality, the tweets still needed to represent the meaning or sententia of the poem. to guarantee that each of these elements was present, it became necessary to consult opob and the numerous tools available. as michele agresta wrote in his comments, the opob is not just a digital collection of petrarca’s poems, something that can be easily found in pdf format after a quick search on the internet, it gathers together not only the poems in different formats from manuscripts to incunabula but also intersemiotic renderings and didactic apparatuses that allow the copious philological attention necessary to any serious attempt at translating and rewriting petrarca’s poems. humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 129 of the many tweets rewritten over the five weeks of this exercise, we report here a number of them that stood out as more able to convey both the meaning and poetic aspects of the poems. poem author original italian tweet original english tweet rewritten english tweet 89 beau battista sono fuggito, ma poi amore mi ha di nuovo ingannato con le sue astuzie, e mi sono trovato nuovamente avvolto nelle sue catene. i escaped, but then love tricked me again with her guile and i found myself wrapped in her chains once again. i escaped but that traitor love tricked me again and i found myself wrapped in her chains once more. 132 adrian de leon se non è amore, cos’è allora quello che sento? sono in alto mare, in una fragile barca senza timone. if it is not love, then what is it that i feel? i am on the high seas in a fragile boat without a helm. what is love? what is right? what is wrong? i am on a fragile boat with no helm with unceasing winds pushing me every which way. 135 miriam muccione sono come la fenice: mi distruggo di passione ma poi rinasco sempre e questo solo contemplando i vostri occhi. i am like a phoenix; i burn with passion, but then i am always reborn, and this only admiring your eyes. i am like a phoenix, my love; i burn with passion, but then i am reborn, through the same fire that just consumed me. 145 rebecca rosenberg mettimi tra i fiori e l’erba o sui ghiacci e la neve, maturo o adolescente, non cambierò mai e continuerò a sospirare d’amore. place me between flowers and grass or on ice and snow. mature and adolescent, i will never change and i will continue to sigh with love. no matter where i am placed, whether it be in heaven or on earth, with or without fame, i will, as a mature and adolescent man, always love. 146 jacob monzingo anima nobile e virtuosa, vorrei che tu fossi regina in tutto il mondo. ma io noble and virtuous soul, i would that you were queen of the world. i am not, however, so famous; noble and virtuous soul, flame, rose, and delight; i would that all recognized your name, but i am humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 130 non sono così famoso: il tuo nome si udirà solo in italia. your name will be heard only in italy. not so famous. only italy will know you. 149 rebecca rosenberg quando il suo sguardo si addolcisce, la passione si riaccende più forte che mai in una guerra continua accesa dalla speranza. when her gaze sweetens, the passion reignites, stronger than ever, in a continuous war heated by hope. when her gaze sweetens, the passion reignites, stronger than ever, in a continuous war heated by hope; thus, my suffering continues. 153 pierpaolo spagnolo lo ripeto: se non mi soccorri, ne morirò. ma non dispero e continuo ad inviare i miei sospiri e dolci pensieri. i repeat: if you do not help me, i will die for it. i do not, however, despair and i continue to send my sighs and sweet thoughts. go, fly, oh my sweet verses; our bad luck may finish this time because love is with us. if she or destiny interferes, our hope will end. 165 miriam muccione l’incedere onesto, lo sguarda soave, le dolcissime parole e l’atto mansueto sono le quattro faville che hanno acceso il fuoco dell’amore. the honest gait, the pleasing gaze, the sweet words and the gentle posture are the four sparks that lit the fire of love. the honest gait, the pleasing gaze, the sweet words and the gentle posture sparkle. they nurture the fire in me. 176 peter kinzig amo la solitudine: nel silenzio di questi boschi, al fruscio delle fronde, sento la vostra presenza. i love the solitude: in the silence of these woods with the rustle of the fronds, i feel your presence. this shady wood consumes me with her sounds: breeze, birds, branches, grass, water. where armed men dare not tread, i am at peace. 176 rebecca rosenberg amo la solitudine: nel silenzio di questi boschi, al fruscio delle fronde, sento la vostra presenza. i love the solitude: in the silence of these woods with the rustle of the fronds, i feel your presence. here in the silent, shadowy woods, no fear can haunt me except that of the amorous sun. her presence surrounds me and yet, she is so far. 188 rebecca io e il sole the sun and i admire o sun, do not take humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 131 rosenberg ammiriamo la stessa dolce fronda, ma il sole fugge e l’ombra nasconde il luogo beato dove il grande lauro fu piccolo virgulto. the sweet foliage, but the sun escapes and the shade hides the blessed place where the great laurel was a small sapling the light of day! the shadow reaches even the blessed place where the inimitable, beloved laurel stands with my heart. 193 pierpaolo spagnolo non c’è cibo più nobile dell’immagine della mia amata. grazie a lei comprendo il valore di ogni cosa terrena e celeste. there is no food nobler than the image of my beloved. thanks to her, i comprehend the value of all things earthly and heavenly. i nourish my mind with nectar sweeter than ambrosia. men can admire the fruit of heaven, nature and earth’s genius unified in one creature. 194 miriam muccione l’aura gentile della mia amata rigenera la natura, mi rasserena e mi abbaglia. il cielo non mi dà ali per fuggire da lei. the gentle breeze of my beloved regenerates nature and both soothes and blinds me. heaven does not give me wings to escape her. she is my sun: she gives me light and she gives me darkness. i want to escape from her sometimes. but i can’t. she is my destiny. 195 beau battista il mare rimarrà senz’acqua e il cielo senza stelle prima che io smetta di amarti. solo la morte guarirà la ferita del mio cuore. the sea will be waterless and the sky starless before i stop loving you. only death will heal my wounded heart. my strength wanes yet my passion doesn't. the sea will be waterless and the sky starless before i stop loving you. only death will heal my heart. 215 adrian de leon laura potrebbe esaurire le risorse mentali di un poeta sommo. la sua bellezza, il suo amore e la sua onestà possono trasformare il mondo. laura could consume the mental resources of a great poet. her beauty, her love and her honesty can transform the world. her humble life and high intellect, pure heart and youthful wisdom are enough to inspire every poet. she can change the world with a glance. 218 peter kinzig amore sembra dirmi che il mondo è più love seems to tell me that the world is more beautiful the beauty of the world is at risk of loss with the humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 132 bello grazie a laura. certo se lei dovesse mancare il mondo diventerebbe un luogo oscuro e desolato. thanks to laura. if she were to be missing, the world would become dark and desolate. departing of the most lovely of women. death will close our eyes to nature. 352 steven packard ti ho visto camminare come un angelo tra l’erba e le viole ma ora dopo il tuo ritorno al creatore tutto è solo ricordo e oscurità. i saw you walk like an angel in the grass and violets, but now, after your return to the creator, everything is only memory and obscurity. i saw you walk like an angel in the grass and flowers, but now, after your return to the creator, the sun has gone and everything is dead. as these tweets variously demonstrate, the students focused their re-writing and translations on meaning, poetic flavor, and musicality. their gratification and sense of fulfillment were apparent at the end of the class when they read in group the entire rvf in the 366 tweets that they had re-written and translated. the technologies and the hypertexts created in our digital era, such as the opob, should be seen as a service to literature, something that enhances, renews and deepens our understanding of it. conversely, the study of literature as a philologically-oriented humanist endeavor may help the refinement and improvement of the digital tools we have at our disposal. our approach and relationship with literature is changing under our eyes as the encounter between digital technology and literature has opened a wealth of new possibilities. our article on a humanist use of twitter in re-reading and re-writing petrarca’s poems may inspire other projects to approach literature with a renewed sense of wonder, triggering readers’ ability to interact directly with the poetic word itself by rewriting stories and poems. we believe that it is important to remember the past and that our exercise of translating and re-writing must be based on philology, passion and imagination. in this way, in our perspective, re-tweeting is no less than re-actualizing the medieval reader that was looking for the sententia in the text. this seems to be a very appropriate way of reading in a time that is witnessing an unprecedented proliferation of textualities that we need to remember and transmit to the future generations of readers. in a certain sense, re-tweeting is also similar to what epic poets, such as homer, were doing by retelling and actualizing the stories and the myths they inherited from the past. the homeric poems were open texts and created by multiple authors, an idea that has been lost since the advent of alphabetic writing as described by plato (phaedro 278 de), according to which the text becomes stabilized and closed, and delivered by the author to the reader, who then loses the ability to ask questions and interact with the author. to take this comparison humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 133 somewhat further, such refashioning is the way the film industry has always, and necessarily, related to literature. directors make films based on books, or even other movies, retelling and personalizing the narrative. a conscientious, humanistic use of twitter gives back this ability, this sense of challenge to readers of literary works. these new ways of dialoguing with the masterpieces of world literature may help us regain a sense of orality in our written world. creativity once again regains its vital importance in education. literature once again is accessible with all its vital energy and power to the modern digital age reader. works cited aciman, alexander, and emmett rensin. twitterature: the world's greatest books in twenty tweets or less. new york, n.y: penguin books, 2009. print. cavallo, guglielmo, roger chartier, and lydia g. cochrane. a history of reading in the west. amherst: university of massachusetts press, 1999. print. cavallo, guglielmo and chartier, roger. “introduction.” a history of reading in the west. 1-36. print. petrarca, francesco, and giuseppe savoca. rerum vulgarium fragmenta. firenze: l. s. olschki, 2008. print. petrarca, francesco, and robert m. durling. petrarch's lyric poems: the rime sparse and other lyrics. cambridge, mass: harvard university press, 1976. print. plato. phaedrus, trans. benjamin jowett. the internet classics archive. web. 4 jan. 2011. <http://classics.mit.edu/plato/phaedrus.html>. landow, george p. hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 1992. print. ---. hyper/text/theory. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 1994. print. lefevere, andré, ed. translation history culture : a sourcebook. london, gbr: routledge, 1992. proquest ebrary. web. 11 august 2015. lollini, massimo. “petrarch and the ethics of writing and reading.” approaches to teaching petrarch’s “canzoniere” and petrarchism. edited by christopher kleinhenz and andrea dini. ny: the modern language association of america, 2014. 188-209. print. ---. “circles or the reader in the network.” humanist studies & the digital age, north america, august 2015. web. http://journals.library.oregonstate.edu/ zali, anne. l'aventure des écritures : la page. bibliothèque nationale de france, 1999. print. http://classics.mit.edu/plato/phaedrus.html humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 134 appendix italian tweet english tweet 1 la giovanile ingenuità con cui ho affrontato l’amore ha prodotto questi versi. ora, da uomo maturo, comprendo il valore profondo delle cose the juvenile ingenuity with which i affronted love has produced these verses. now, as a mature man, i understand the deep value of things. 2 ora hai compiuto la tua vendetta, amore, ed io sono in tuo potere. now you have taken your revenge, love, and i am in your power. 3 sono stato colpito da amore il giorno in cui ero più debole e indifeso. laura invece è rimasta indifferente agli assalti del cuore. i was hit by love on the day in which i was most weak and helpless. laura, instead, has remained indifferent to the assaults of the heart. 4 come dio ha scelto un luogo umile per mostrarsi agli uomini, così ha scelto un piccolo borgo per donare agli uomini la bellezza di laura. as god chose a humble place to show himself to men, he similarly picked a small hamlet to offer laura's beauty to men. 5 il vostro stesso nome mi spinge a una lauta lode e a una regale riverenza, ma insieme esso impone una tacita contemplazione your own name pushes me to a lavish praise and a regal reference, but at the same time, it imposes a tacit contemplation. 6 il mio desiderio è talmente folle che quanto più cerco di tenerlo a freno, tanto più diventa incontrollabile. my desire is so foolish that as much as i try to constrain it, it becomes that much more uncontrollable. 7 non lasciarti traviare dalle abitudini peggiori e, attraverso la poesia, persegui la via del sapere lontano dalla volgarità diffusa. do not be led astray by the worst habits, but rather, through poetry, pursue the path of knowledge far from the diffuse vulgarity. 8 l’amore ci dà pace e libertà, ma ora, ci sta dando solo paura. abbiamo una consolazione: un giorno si realizzerà la sua vendetta. love gives us peace and liberty, but now it is giving us only fear. thus, we have one consolation: one day it will realize its revenge. 9 quando i pianeti sono allineati, ci danno il frutto della vita e l’umore terrestre, ma per me la primavera non arriverà mai. when the planets are aligned, they give us the fruit of life and the terrestrial humor, but for me, spring will never come. 10 o amico l'ira del potere non ti allontanò dalla retta via. la bellezza della natura eleva ispirazione e pensieri amorosi, ma tu non sei qui. the ire of power did not distance you from the right path. nature's beauty elevates inspiration and amorous thoughts, but you are not here. 11 da quando conoscete il mio desiderio il vostro capo è coperto e un velo nasconde impietosamente gli occhi meravigliosi che vorrei ammirare. since learning of my desire, your head is covered and a veil unmercifully hides the wonderful eyes i would like to admire. humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 135 12 vorrei vedere laura da vecchia, con i capelli d’argento e le rughe intorno agli occhi: quel giorno mi basterà un suo sorriso! i wish i could see laura in old age, with silver hair and wrinkled eyes: that day, her smile will be enough! 13 ogni volta che vedo il volto divino di laura in lei vedo il sommo bene. every time i see laura’s divine face, i see in her the greatest good. 14 sto preparando i miei occhi e i miei pensieri per la dolorosa sfida di amore che prima o poi dovrò affrontare. i am preparing my eyes and thoughts for the painful challenge of love that i will have to face sooner or later. 15 mi domando come sia possibile sopravvivere senza lo spirito che mi anima, ma è un dolore che ogni uomo innamorato deve provare. i ask myself how it is possible to survive without the spirit that enlivens me, but it is a pain that every man in love must experience. 16 quando cerco il volto laura in altri volti, mi sento come un vecchio pellegrino in cerca dell'immagine vera del volto di cristo. when i seek laura’s face in others, i feel like an old pilgrim in search of the true image of christ’s face. 17 la donna che amo è l’unica persona che può farmi piangere e sorridere. quando se ne va, la mia anima vuole seguirla. the woman i love is the only person who can make me cry and smile. when she leaves, my soul wants to follow her. 18 penso al volto di laura ma il desiderio per lei evoca dolore e il pensiero inquieto della morte. non voglio parlarne e piango in solitudine. i think of laura’s face but this desire evokes pain and the restless thought of death. i do not want to talk about it and cry in solitude. 19 sono una farfalla attratta dalla fiamma, incapace di allontanarmi anche quando brucia. il mio destino è andare dietro a ciò che mi arde. i am a butterfly attracted to the flame, unable to distance myself even when it burns. my destiny is to chase that which singes me. 20 la sua bellezza è così elevata che è impossibile descriverla tramite la voce, la penna o i pensieri. her beauty is so great that it’s impossible to describe it by means of the voice, the pen or the thoughts. 21 ho offerto il mio cuore a voi, ma non lo accoglierete. il mio cuore non appartiene ad altra donna perciò non rimane che la morte. i offered my heart but you wouldn’t accept it. my heart doesn’t belong to any other woman, therefore all that remains is death. 22 il mio desiderio per laura non conoscerà mai pace. voglio passare la notte con lei, ma è più probabile che le stelle brillino di giorno. my desire for laura will never know peace. i want to spend the night with her, but it is more likely that the stars will shine at day. 23 l’amo così profondamente che la mia anima vive una metamorfosi non umana. quando mi ritrovo umano, il pensiero rimane elevato. i love her so profoundly that my soul lives a non-human metamorphosis. when i find myself human again, the thought remains noble. 24 ho perduto la gloria poetica per il troppo amore. non mi rimane che il pianto. per questo ti consiglio una vita i lost the poetic glory due to too much love. all that remain are tears. for this i recommend a more tranquil life. humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 136 più tranquilla. 25 io non ho mai abbandonato l’amore come invece voi avete fatto, amico poeta. ma dio indica il ritorno all’amore per quanto difficile sia. i’ve never abandoned love like you did, my poet friend. but god indicates the return to love, as difficult as it is. 26 caro amico dovete sentirvi come chi evita il naufragio o come un prigioniero liberato. l’errore è finito: siete tornato alla poesia d’amore. my dear friend, you must feel as one who avoids the shipwreck or is a freed prisoner. the error's finished: you returned to love’s poetry. 27 l’italia piange l’assenza del papa di avignone. ma il papa ritornerà nella sua giusta sede a roma e una crociata sconfiggerà gli infedeli. italy laments the absence of the avignon pope. but the pope will return to his rightful seat in rome and a crusade will defeat the infidels. 28 l'amore non è solo eros per una donna, ma anche caritas per una causa grande e nobile. ben venga la crociata contro gli infedeli. love is not eros for a woman, but also caritas for a grand and noble cause. we welcome the crusade against the infidels. 29 donna, la tua bellezza è astrale, splendente e calda, ma mi ferisce come un’ustione. sono come didone che si uccise vedendo partire enea. woman, your beauty is astral, shining and warm, but it hurts me like a burn. i’m like dido who killed herself watching aeneas leave. 30 quando io realizzerò il mio sogno vedrò ghiacciarsi il fuoco e ardere la neve. da sette anni vago pallido e infuocato nell’animo per lei. when i realize my dream i’ll see fire ice over and snow burn. for seven years i’ve wandered pale and inflamed for her. 31 peccato che questa donna stia per morire. almeno sarà l’anima più gradita e bella in cielo. la sua luce offuscherà tutte le altre stelle. pity that this woman is to die. at least hers will be the most appreciated soul in heaven. her light will outshine all the other stars. 32 avvicinandomi alla morte mi rendo conto che non parlerò più per molto d’amore e troverò così pace in cose di più alto valore. as i approach death, i realize that i won’t speak of love much longer and thus i’ll find peace in more valuable things. 33 nella luce dell’alba mi sei apparsa alla mente e mi hai detto: “non temere: la mia malattia è finita e i tuoi occhi mi vedranno ancora.” in the light of dawn, you appeared in my mind and told me: “don’t fear: my illness has passed and your eyes will see me again”. 34 apollo, dio della poesia e della medicina, tu conosci l’amore per il lauro. difendi laura e goditi con me la meraviglia della sua salute. apollo, god of poetry and medicine, you know the love for the laurel. defend laura and enjoy with me the magnificence of her health. 35 mi aggiro solo nei campi. vorrei trovare un luogo selvaggio, dove amore non possa trovarmi ma lui viene sempre a ragionar con me. i wander alone in the fields. i’d like to find a wild place, where love can’t find me, but he always comes to reason with me. 36 ho pensato che la morte potesse i thought that death would liberate my humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 137 liberare la mia anima dalle pene d’amore. ora sono pieno di dubbi e invoco l’aiuto di amore e della morte. soul from the pains of love. now i’m full of doubt and i invoke the help of love and death. 37 la vita passa rapida, la morte si avvicina e laura è lontana, anche la speranza mi abbandona. ma voglio ancora raggiungerla dovunque sia. life passes quickly, death arrives and laura is far, even hope has abandoned me. but i still want to reach her wherever she may be. 38 nessuna barriera naturale sembra importuna più del velo che copre gli occhi di laura. ma anche la bianca mano ostacola la mia vista. no natural barrier seems to be more obtrusive than the veil that covers laura’s eyes. and yet the white hand also obstructs my sight. 39 temo la forza dello sguardo di laura e il rimprovero che può venire dai suoi begli occhi. posso essere scusato se ho tardato a guardarla. i dread the strength of laura’s gaze and the reproach that may come from her beautiful eyes. i can be excused if i delayed to observe her. 40 se amore o morte non mi interrompono scriverò un’opera straordinaria, classica e moderna. ma un libro mi è necessario. if love or death don’t interrupt me, i’ll write an extraordinary work, classic and modern. but a book is necessary to me. 41 da quando laura ha lasciato il suo luogo, gli influssi maligni dei pianeti e i venti imperversano sulla terra e nel mare. since laura left her place, the evil influences of the planets and winds rage on the land and the sea. 42 laura è tornata e l’influsso negativo delle stelle si è dissolto. il suo bel viso fa innamorare, riporta la primavera e i fiori nei prati. laura is back and the bad influence of the stars dispelled. her beautiful face brings back love, the spring and the flowers in the meadows. 43 il sole non tornava a causa della tua mancanza. è stato il pianto che mi ha impedito di vedere il tuo ritorno. the sun did not return because of your absence. it was weeping that impeded me from seeing your return. 44 cesare ha avuto pietà per pompeo e davide per golia, ma i begli occhi per me non versano nemmeno una lacrima, solo sdegno! caesar had pity for pompey and david for goliath, but the beautiful eyes do not have even one tear for me, only disdain! 45 laura, il tuo amato specchio è il mio nemico. non posso stare con te perché ami troppo te stessa, sei una vera narcisista. laura, your beloved mirror is my enemy. i cannot be with you because you love yourself too much, you are a true narcissist. 46 sono gli specchi in cui contempli la tua divina bellezza che mi tormentano di più, perché a causa loro ti allontani da me. the mirrors in which you contemplate your divine beauty are those that torment me the most: because of them you distance yourself from me. 47 lo spirito vitale mi abbandona se non vedo i vostri occhi sereni. ora capisco che è il desiderio che mi mantiene in vita. the vital spirit will abandon me if i do not see your serene eyes. i now understand that it is that desire that keeps me alive. 48 il fragore del nilo assorda; la luce del the roar of the nile deafens; the light humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 138 sole acceca e la forza dell’amore che non può esprimersi perde vigore con la perseveranza. of the sun blinds and the power of love that cannot express itself loses vigor with time. 49 ingrata lingua, non mi rendi onore, più ho bisogno di te per esprimere il mio amore e più mi deludi e diventi incomprensibile. ungrateful tongue, you don’t bring me honor, the more i need you to express my love, the more you disappoint me and become incomprehensible. 50 quando il sole tramonta, la pace si diffonde ovunque: solo io rimango prigioniero della mia passione. when the sun sets, peace spreads everywhere: only i remain prisoner of my own passion. 51 non posso diventare laura, vorrei diventare una statua della pietra più dura per liberarmi dalla passione come fece atlante con medusa. since i cannot become laura when she nears, i would become a statue of the hardest stone to be free from passion, as did atlas for medusa. 52 quando l’ho vista bagnare il velo, era estate. eppure ho avuto un brivido tremando d’amore. when i saw her soaking her veil it was summer. nonetheless i shivered, trembling of love. 53 solo cola di rienzo può riportare roma e l’italia agli antichi splendori con l’aiuto del cielo. only cola di rienzo can bring rome and italy back to their ancient splendor with the help of god. 54 mi sono ritratto appena in tempo dalla selva oscura in cui stavo per perdermi con la pellegrina che aveva colpito il mio fragile cuore. i recoiled just in time from the dark forest in which i was about to get lost with the pilgrim who had struck my fragile heart. 55 non riesco a superare l’amore per laura e ogni volta che cerco di dimenticarla, finisco per innamorarmi di lei ancora di più. i cannot get over my love for laura and every time i try to forget her, i end up more in love with her. 56 quale ombra sovrasta il frutto delle mie speranze, quale belva ruggisce nel mio cuore? è vero: nessuno è felice prima della morte. which shadow looms over the fruit of my hopes, which beast roars in my heart? it is true: no one is happy before death. 57 la neve diventerà tiepida e nera, l’oceano senza onde e i pesci andranno sulle montagne prima che io trovi la pace. the snow will become tepid and black, the ocean without waves and the fish will climb the mountains before i can find peace. 58 bevo il magico infuso di amore. il primo sorso è amaro, ma poi diventa sempre più dolce. i sip the magic infusion of love. the first drop is bitter, but then it becomes sweeter and sweeter. 59 amore nascose fra le trecce bionde i lacci con i quali mi avvinse. nemmeno la morte li scioglierà. love hid between the blonde braids, the laces of which she bound me. not even death will untie them. 60 sono stato innamorato di un dolce albero, ma ora il suo legno si è indurito. ora maledico lui e le sue foglie verdi! i was in love with a sweet tree, but now its wood has hardened. now i curse it and its green leaves. 61 ogni cosa che ha a che fare con laura everything related to laura must be humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 139 deve essere benedetta blessed. 62 dopo anni passati pensando a laura, vorrei dedicare la mia vita a dio. after many years spent thinking about laura, i would like to dedicate my life to god. 63 uno sguardo di laura può darmi la vita o la morte perché lei è la padrona del mio cuore e ogni cosa che viene da lei è dolce onore. a look from laura can give me life or death because she is the owner of my heart and everything that comes from her is sweet honor. 64 anche se la terra dove pianto il mio amore è arida, il destino non mi lascia far altrimenti. even though the land on which i plant my love is arid, destiny does not allow me to do otherwise. 65 non sono capace difendermi dal potere di amore, che ha incendiato il mio cuore per laura. spero che anche lei abbia la sua parte di foco. i am not capable of defending myself from the power of love that set fire to my heart for laura. i hope she has her part of the fire too. 66 finiscono le nebbie e il ghiaccio—non finisce mai la nebbia che nasconde gli occhi di laura e fa piovere i miei per sempre! fog and ice finish – but the fog that hides laura’s eyes and makes mine rain never does. 67 povero me! pensando a laura sono caduto in un ruscello. almeno sono bagnati i piedi invece degli occhi. poor me! while thinking about laura i fell into a creek. at least my feet are wet instead of my eyes. 68 cosa devo fare? stare dove trovo l’ispirazione spirituale o tornare a vedere laura? discuto con me stesso e chissà cosa succederà! what should i do? be where i find spiritual inspiration or return to see laura? i argue with myself and who knows what will happen! 69 eccomi in viaggio al largo della costa, cercando di scappare da laura, ma amore mi troverà e non potrò evitare il destino! here i am travelling at sea, trying to escape from laura, but love will find me and i will not be able to avoid my destiny. 70 laura non può essere la causa del mio male. la mia capacità di comprendere è limitata e sono abbagliato dalla bellezza che adorna il mondo. laura cannot be the cause of my pain. my capacity to comprehend is limited and i am dazzled by the beauty that adorns the world. 71 se solo riuscirò a reggere la luce dei vostri occhi, la mia felicità sarà senza tempo. if i only can hold up against the light of your eyes, my happiness will be endless. 72 non merito i vostri occhi ma non copriteli, sono faville angeliche beatrici e solo in loro può essere la fine delle mie sofferenze. i do not deserve your eyes, but do not cover them for they glimmer with angelic bliss and only in them can be the end of my suffering. 73 i tuoi occhi sono fonte d’ogni salute e comunicano una pace simile a quella che nel cielo è eterna, il loro splendore eccede la mia vista. your eyes are the source of all health and they transmit a peace similar to that which in heaven is eternal, their splendor exceeds my view. 74 sono stanco di pensare come il mio i am tired of thinking that my love has humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 140 amore non abbia fine ma la mia passione è più forte delle mie parole e mi impone di scrivere. no end but my passion is stronger than my words and forces me to write. 75 i tuoi occhi sono più potenti di qualunque magia, sono disposto a seguirli, finché il mio cuore ne avrà la forza. your eyes are stronger than any magic, i am willing to follow them as long as my heart has enough strength. 76 in realtà non potrò mai stancarmi di pensare a voi. dopo tutto, solo i vostri occhi possono guarire la mia pena. in reality i will never be able to get over thinking about you. after all, only your eyes can cure my pain. 77 solo simone ha saputo ritrarre la vostra immagine celeste e vera. only simone could portray your celestial and true image. 78 simone, tu sei stato in paradiso, così hai potuto ritrarre tutta la sua bellezza anche se non hai potuto darle la parola per rispondermi. simone, you have been in heaven, so you could portray all of her beauty, although you could not provide her the words with which to respond. 79 non potrò durare a lungo in questo crescente desiderio. la morte si avvicina, e la vita fugge sotto il giogo dei suoi occhi. i will not last long in this growing desire. death is coming and life flees under the yoke of her eyes. 80 la mia vita è una nave in piena tempesta. il vento gonfia troppo le vele e mi trascina fra gli scogli. dio mi indichi un porto sicuro. my life is a ship in the peak of a storm. the wind inflates the sails too much and drags me into the rocks. may god show me a safe harbor. 81 sento il peso del mio corpo e vorrei avere ali di colomba per sollevarmi da così in basso. i feel the weight of my body and i wish i had the wings of a dove to lift me from these lows. 82 sulla mia tomba non sarà scritto che voi siete stata la causa della mia morte, ma promettetemi almeno la vostra pietà. on my tombstone there will not be written that you were the cause of my death, but at least promise me your pity. 83 forse quando sarò vecchio non potrete più fare strazio di me, e mi resterà solo il vostro languido ricordo. maybe when i am old you will no longer torment me, and only your weak memory will remain. 84 i miei occhi e il mio cuore non hanno scuse: entrambi aprendo le porte al mio desiderio amoroso sono stati la causa mia rovina. my eyes and heart have no excuses: by opening the doors to my loving desire, both have been the cause of my ruin. 85 io amai sempre e amo il luogo e l'ora del primo incontro, il desiderio cresce e con esso la speranza. i always have and still do love the place and time of our first encounter, the desire grows and my hope with it. 86 soffro infinitamente a causa della mia fragilità. vorrei morire e odio gli occhi di laura per avermi ferito in modo non mortale. i suffer infinitely because of my fragility. i wish i could die and hate laura’s eyes for wounding me in a non mortal way. 87 laura, sai che le tue frecce hanno centrato il mio cuore. so che mi farai laura, you know that your arrows have pierced my heart. i know you will make humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 141 soffrire sempre di più, senza uccidermi. me suffer more and more without ever killing me. 88 nonostante le ferite che amore mi ha inferto, cerco di fuggire. ma solo uno su mille si salva e anche laura rimase ferita al cuore. despite the wounds inflicted upon me by love i try to flee. yet only one in a thousand saves himself and even laura’s heart was wounded. 89 sono fuggito, ma poi amore mi ha di nuovo ingannato con le sue astuzie, e mi sono trovato nuovamente avvolto nelle sue catene. i escaped, but then love tricked me again with her guile and i found myself wrapped in her chains once again. 90 ricordo i capelli sparsi al vento e il viso colorato di pietà. era un’illusione? mi innamorai di quello che sembrava uno spirito celeste. i recall her hair in the wind and her face colored with pity. was it an illusion? i fell in love with that which seemed a celestial spirit. 91 piangi la morte dell’amata ma liberati da quella passione e pensa a salire verso il cielo con la tua anima pellegrina. cry for the death of the beloved, but free yourself from that passion and think of rising toward heaven with your pilgrim soul. 92 tutti sulla terra devono piangere la morte del grande poeta cino. piangono pistoia e anche le sue rime. il cielo invece deve rallegrarsi. everyone on earth must cry for the great poet cino's death. pistoia and his rhymes also cry. the sky, instead, rejoices. 93 ero impegnato in altre opere e mi sono allontanato da amore; ma gli occhi di laura possono ancora farmi piangere. i was busy with other works and i distanced myself from love, but laura's eyes can still make me cry. 94 quei due giovani sembrano innamorati. hanno perso ogni vitalità, e sono pallidi come morti. io mi sento come loro. those two youths seem to be in love. they have lost every vitality and they are as pale as death. i feel like them. 95 vorrei scrivere quello che sento, provocando la pietà di tutti. ma lei mi può leggere come un libro: non serve che io scriva versi i would like to write what i feel, provoking everyone’s pity. but she can read me like a book: i do not need to write verses. 96 sono così stanco di aspettare un segno d’amore che ora odio il mio desiderio. laura, il tuo viso nel mio cuore è un segno della mia servitù. i am so tired of waiting for a sign of love that now i hate my desire. laura, your face in my heart is a sign of my servitude. 97 amore mi sprona e tutte le strade portano a lei. da quando i suoi occhi mi hanno ferito ho perduto la mia libertà e ripeto il suo nome. love pushes me and all the streets bring me to her. since the moment her eyes wounded me, i lost my freedom and i repeat her name. 98 orso, sì, questa volta non puoi combattere, ma non lamentarti troppo, e non sospirare! il pubblico sa quanto sei valoroso. orso, yes, this time you can not fight, but do not complain too much, and don't sigh! the public knows how valiant you are. humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 142 99 stai attento! la vita è come un prato e c’è un serpente fra l’erba! avviati per una strada più sicura, non come ho fatto io. careful! life is like a field and there is a snake in the grass! go for the safer road, not like i did. 100 questa finestra, questa sedia di pietra e la primavera mi addolorano perché mi parlano di te. this window, this stone chair and spring pain me because they speak to me about you. 101 che perdita di tempo è amore! e’ impossibile liberarsi di lui, è più forte di una magia. potrà la ragione vincere la forza del desiderio? what a waste of time is love! it is impossible to get rid of it and it is stronger than magic. will reason be able to overcome this desire? 102 cesare pianse invece di sorridere; annibale sorrise per rassicurare coloro che piangevano; così rido io per nascondere il pianto! caesar cried instead of smiling; hannibal smiled to reassure those who cried; in this way, i laugh in order to hide the weeping. 103 caro signore, gli orsini sono arrabbiati come un’orsa per l’assassinio dei suoi figli; dovete mantenere onore e fama con la spada! dear lord, the orsini’s are as angry as a bear for the assassination of her cubs. you must maintain honor and fame with the sword! 104 caro pandolfo, il tuo valore e la tua virtù mi spingono ad immortalarti nei miei versi che sono più potenti del marmo. dear pandolfo, your valor and your virtue push me to immortalize you in my verses, which are stronger than marble. 105 amore e gelosia mi hanno tolto il cuore e l’hanno privato dei segni del bel volto che possono condurmi ad una vita migliore. love and jealousy have removed my heart and deprived it of signs of the beautiful face that could guide me to a better life. 106 come un angelo venuto dal cielo, laura è scesa per legarmi a sé con la luce dei suoi occhi e per illuminare il mio cammino. like an angel from heaven, laura descended in order to bind me to her with the light of her eyes and to illuminate my path. 107 non riesco a sfuggire alla bellezza dei suoi occhi e amore continua a farmi vagare per la selva delle cose mondane. i can not manage to escape from her eyes’ beauty and love continues to make me wander in the wood of worldly things. 108 non mi scordo mai il momento in cui laura si volse verso di me in valchiusa: o sennuccio, aiutami a rievocarlo. i never forget the moment in which laura turned toward me in valchiusa. o sennuccio, help me to evoke it again! 109 di nulla mi importa quando penso all’aura soave che muove dal viso luminoso di laura e mi dà conforto e sollievo. nothing is important to me when i think of the pleasing aura that emanates from laura’s luminous face and gives me comfort and relief. 110 ho visto laura in sogno, era un’ombra. ma quando ho visto i suoi occhi, è diventata un raggio di sole. i saw laura in a dream; she was a shadow. when i saw her eyes, however, she became a ray of sunshine. 111 il mio incontro con laura oggi mi ha my encounter with laura today struck humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 143 colpito così forte che da un pò di tempo non sento ricolmo di piacere e lontano dal dolore. me so strongly that it has been some time since i have not felt filled with pleasure and far from pain. 112 sennuccio voglio che tu sappia che laura domina ogni momento della mia vita ed io non posso che pensare a lei. sennuccio, i want you to know that laura dominates every moment of my life and i can not help but to think about her. 113 o sennuccio, davanti alla casa di laura si è riaccesa la mia passione e spenta la paura. cosa succederebbe se potessi vedere i suoi occhi? sennuccio, at laura’s house, love rekindled the fire in my soul and spent the fear. what if i could look into her eyes? 114 nella solitudine di questo luogo, ma lontano dalla corruzione di avignone e dalla folla, mi dedico alla poesia, all’amore e all’amicizia. in the solitude of this place, but far from avignon’s corruption and from the crowd, i dedicate myself to poetry, to love and to friendship. 115 se laura ha preferito me al sole, forse posso sperare nella sua benevolenza. if laura preferred me to the sun, then perhaps i can hope in her benevolence. 116 il mio unico pensiero è lei. trovo conforto in questa valle protetta, senza donne, solo con i miei pensieri d'amore. she is my only thought. i find comfort in this protected valley, without women, alone with my thoughts of love. 117 i miei sospiri per laura avrebbero più agevole strada se il monte che chiude valchiusa si piegasse verso roma disdegnando avignone. my sighs for laura would have an easier path if the mountain that closes valchiusa were to bend toward rome scorning avignon. 118 ho sospirato per sedici anni, ma la mia sofferenza continua, sono rimasto sempre uguale e non voglio cambiare. i have sighed for sixteen years, but my suffering continues. i have remained always the same and i do not want to change. 119 l'amicizia della gloria mi fa vedere una donna ancora più bella che si chiama virtù. così mi trovo sul capo una ghirlanda di lauro. glory’s friendship makes me see a woman even more beautiful called virtue. in this way, i find a laurel wreath on my head. 120 rispondo con affetto, amico mio, alle vostre condoglianze premature. sappiate che sono giunto alle porte della morte, ma non era ancora il tempo. i respond with affection, my friend, to your premature condolences. you know that i had arrived at death’s door, but it was not yet my time. 121 vendicami, amore, perché questa donna non ha pietà di me, né rispetta voi. voi potete colpirla con il vostro arco. avenge me, love, for this woman has no mercy for me or respect for you! you can strike her with your bow. 122 i miei capelli diventano grigi, i miei sensi declinano, ma la fiamma accesa 17 anni fa rimane. si spegnerà mai? my hair becomes gray, my senses decline, but the flame lit seventeen years ago remains. will it ever go out? 123 ho capito in quel momento, dal suo sguardo turbato e dal suo angelico i realized, in that moment, from her dismayed gaze and from her angelic humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 144 pallore, che le sarei mancato. pallor, that she would miss me. 124 tormentato dalla malinconia amorosa, non ho più speranza nel futuro: le mie attese si infrangono come vetro. tormented by amorous melancholy, i have no more hope in the future; my expectations shatter like glass. 125 se solo trovassi le parole giuste per esprimervi la mia passione! rivolgo il mio canto all’amica riva ove spero trovare traccia di voi. if only i could find the right words to express my passion! i address my song to my shore friend, where i hope to find traces of you. 126 vorrei giacere per sempre in questi luoghi e aspettare il vostro arrivo. la vostra pietà potrebbe allora aprire alla mia anima le porte del paradiso. i would like to lie forever in these places and wait for your arrival. your pity could then open heaven’s gates for my soul. 127 cerco di esprimere in questi versi l’immensità della mia ammirazione, ma è come svuotare il mare e contare le stelle. i attempt to express through these verses the immensity of my admiration, but it is like emptying the sea and counting the stars. 128 superate la vostra cupidità, signori d’italia. la porta del cielo sarà aperta se ascolterete le parole di questa canzone: pace, pace, pace. overtake your cupidity, lords of italy! heaven’s door will be open if you listen to these lyrics: peace, peace, peace. 129 la mia immaginazione disegna dovunque il vostro viso e non riesco fermare i miei passi. per voi scalerei le montagne più alte. my imagination paints your face everywhere and i can not stop my steps. i would climb the highest mountains for you. 130 nel mio esilio non posso che piangere ma le lacrime mi sono dolci. non penso che alla sua immagine dipinta nel mio cuore da amore. in my exile, i can not but cry, but the tears are sweet to me. i only think of her image painted in my heart by love. 131 mi chiedi cosa fare in questo vivere greve? posso dirti solo che canterei l'amore per colei che rende lieta la mia vita. you ask me what to do in this heavy life. i can only tell you that i would sing of the love for she who makes my life happy. 132 se non è amore, cos’è allora quello che sento? sono in alto mare, in una fragile barca senza timone. if it is not love, then what is it that i feel? i am on the high seas in a fragile boat without a helm. 133 amore mi ha trasformato in un bersaglio, come neve al sole, come cera al fuoco. la mia vita fugge senza scampo alla tua dolce aura. love transformed me into a target, like snow to the sun or wax to a fire. my life runs away without salvation from your sweet breeze. 134 donna per voi temo e spero, ardo e son di ghiaccio, nulla stringo e abbraccio tutto il mondo. odio la vita e la morte allo stesso modo. woman, i fear and hope for you; i burn and i am ice. i clasp nothing and i hug the whole world. i hate life and death in the same way. 135 sono come la fenice: brucio di passione ma poi rinasco sempre e questo solo contemplando i vostri occhi. i am like a phoenix; i burn with passion, but then i am always reborn, and this only admiring your eyes. humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 145 136 voglia dio punire la curia di avignone in cui sembra concentrarsi tutto il male del mondo. may god punish the avignon curia in which it seems all the evil of the world is concentrated. 137 la curia papale di avignone ha colmato la misura della corruzione e venera gli idoli della lussuria e dell’incontinenza. ma sarà distrutta. the avignon papal curia has filled the measure of corruption and venerates the idols of desire and incontinence. it will be destroyed. 138 o inferno babilonese! la sede papale è una meretrice sfacciata che genera il male. perché costantino non torna a revocare la sua donazione? o babylonian hell! the papal seat is a brazen harlot that generates evil. why does constantine not come to revoke his gift? 139 vorrei rimanere nella pace del convento dei monaci di montrieux. la ragione però non ascolta il cuore e mi spinge all’esilio. i would like to remain in the peace of the montrieux monk’s convent. reason does not, however, listen to the heart and pushes me to exile. 140 anche amore è intimorito dagli sguardi ritrosi di laura. io non posso che stare con lui fino alla morte. even love is intimidated by laura’s bashful gazes! i can not help but to stay with him until death. 141 sono abbagliato dai tuoi occhi e li seguirò, anche se vedo la mia anima in catene andare spontaneamente verso la morte. i am dazzled by your eyes and i will follow them to spontaneously go toward death, even if i see my soul in chains. 142 una luce fantastica mi spingeva a cercare il lauro. ma tutto nella natura è destinato a cambiare e un’altra luce mi dice ora cosa fare. a fantastic light pushed me to search for the laurel. everything in nature is destined to change and now another light tells me what to do. 143 la poesia d’amore mi riaccende un desiderio così forte che potrebbe infiammare i morti. pensando a lei tremo e non riesco a parlare. love poetry reignites in me a desire so strong that it could inflame the dead. thinking of her, i tremble and i am unable to speak. 144 il cielo più terso, il sole più bello e l’arcobaleno più variopinto li ho visti quando ti ho incontrato. tutto riceve luce dai tuoi occhi. i saw the clearest sky, the most beautiful sun and the most colorful rainbow when i met you. everything receives light from your eyes. 145 mettimi tra i fiori e l’erba o sui ghiacci e la neve, maturo o adolescente, non cambierò mai e continuerò a sospirare d’amore. place me between flowers and grass or on ice and snow. mature and adolescent, i will never change and i will continue to sigh with love. 146 anima nobile e virtuosa, vorrei che tu fossi regina in tutto il mondo. ma io non sono così famoso: il tuo nome si udirà solo in italia. noble and virtuous soul, i would that you were queen of the world. i am not, however, so famous; your name will be heard only in italy. 147 i tuoi occhi possono essere un freno potente alla mia passione eccessiva, ma si rasserenano quando ritrovo la moderazione. your eyes can be a powerful brake to my excessive passion, but they brighten when i find moderation again. humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 146 148 i grandi fiumi e gli alberi non possono mitigare il fuoco ardente del cuore. solo il sorga piange con me, e l’ombra del lauro mi consola. the great rivers and trees can not mitigate the ardent fire of the heart. only the sorgue cries with me and the laurel’s shadow consoles me. 149 quando il suo sguardo si addolcisce, la passione si riaccende più forte che mai in una guerra continua accesa dalla speranza. when her gaze sweetens, the passion reignites, stronger than ever, in a continuous war heated by hope. 150 anima mia avremo mai pace? laura provoca questa guerra con me stesso, non lascia grandi speranze per il futuro. my soul, will we ever have peace? laura provokes this war with myself. she does not leave great hopes for the future. 151 gli occhi soavi di laura mi abbagliano con gli strali dell’amore ma sono il porto da cui nasce la mia poesia. laura’s pleasing eyes dazzle me with arrows of love, but they are the port from which my poetry is born. 152 se continuerai a tenermi in sospeso non potrò che morire: la mia forza vitale è fragile e stanca di tanta incertezza. if you continue to keep me in suspense, i will have no choice but to die. my life force is fragile and tired from such uncertainty. 153 lo ripeto: se non mi soccorri, ne morirò. ma non dispero e continuo ad inviare i miei sospiri e dolci pensieri. i repeat: if you do not help me, i will die for it. i do not, however, despair and i continue to send my sighs and sweet thoughts. 154 non posso che lodare i tuoi occhi come ispiratori di virtù e l’aria attraversata dalla loro luce la rende manifesta. i can only praise your eyes as promoters of virtue and the air crossed by their light makes it evident. 155 il tuo pianto è per me fonte di dolore e sospiri tanto intensi che rimane scolpito nel mio cuore. your weeping is for me a source of such pain and intense sighs that it remains carved into my heart. 156 il tuo pianto è la più dolce musica che si possa udire al mondo e persino la natura si raccoglie ad ascoltarlo. your weeping is the sweetest music that may be heard in the world. even nature gathers to heart it. 157 la mia mente torna spesso all’immagine di laura, una dea dai capelli d'oro, il viso di neve, gli occhi di stelle e le lacrime di cristallo. my mind returns often to laura’s image: a goddess with golden hair, a snow-white face, celestial eyes and crystal tears. 158 la vedo dappertutto, la sua bellezza e la pena che esprime con dolce tono dolente e belle lacrime sono incomparabili ad ogni cosa terrena. i see her everywhere. her beauty, her pain expressed with sweet, painful tones, and her beautiful tears are unmatched by anything earthly. 159 da dove viene tanta bellezza? la sua origine non può che essere divina. from where does such beauty come? its origin can only be divine! 160 la tua celestiale bellezza risplende sull’erba e tra i fiori della primavera, che formano una ghirlanda per i tuoi riccioli d’oro. your celestial beauty shines on the grass and between the spring flowers, which form a wreath for your golden curls. humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 147 161 o atroce e seducente passione, stai devastando la mia vita! c’è qualche anima nobile che può capirmi? o atrocious and seductive passion, you are destroying my life! is there any noble soul that can understand me? 162 invidio la terra su cui si muove la mia cara laura. questi fiori, questi fiumi e questi boschi sono parte di lei! i envy the ground on which my dear laura wanders. these flowers, these rivers and these woods are part of her! 163 come posso seguire il ritmo dell’amore? non riesco a scalare le montagne così velocemente! mi basta che a lei non dispiacciano i miei sospiri. how can i follow the rhythm of love? i cannot climb the mountains that fast! for me, it is enough that she does not dislike my sighs. 164 la notte è serena e il mare giace senza onde ma io penso, ardo d’amore e piango. tu sola sei la fonte della mia gioia e del mio dolore. the night is serene and the sea lies without waves, but i think, burn with love and cry. only you are the source of my joy and of my pain. 165 l 'incedere onesto, lo sguardo soave, le dolcissime parole e l’atto mansueto sono le quattro faville che hanno acceso il fuoco dell’amore. the honest gait, the pleasing gaze, the sweet words and the gentle posture are the four sparks that lit the fire of love. 166 la mia vena poetica si è inaridita! solo la grazia di dio mi può soccorrere, o firenze non avrà il suo poeta. my poetic vein is now dry! only god’s grace can assist me or florence will not have its poet. 167 vivo e muoio allo stesso tempo. la sua voce ha questo potere su di me. lei è la sirena che controlla la mia vita. i live and die at the same time. her voice has this power over me. she is the siren who controls my life. 168 amore mi dice che non sono mai stato così vicino ai miei desideri. devo credergli? lo specchio mi dice che intanto sto solo invecchiando. love tells me that i have never been so close to my desires. must i believe him? the mirror, meanwhile, tells me that i am only aging. 169 mi sento solo al mondo e cerco solo voi, solo un po’ di pietà nei vostri occhi potrà riportarmi alla poesia. i feel alone in the world and i seek only you. only some pity in your eyes can bring me back to poetry. 170 vorrei dirti solo qualche parola ma la passione mi paralizza, come succede solo agli innamorati veri. i would like to tell you only a few words, but my passion paralyzes me, as happens only to true lovers. 171 stretto tra le vostre braccia che mi tormentano, non riesco a scalfire il vostro cuore gelido, ma non perderò mai le mie speranze. wrapped in your arms that torment me, i can not scratch your frozen heart, but i will never lose my hopes. 172 l'invidia si è impossessata del tuo cuore e mi stai uccidendo mille volte al giorno. ma amore mi rassicura ed io continuerò ad amarti. the envy has taken possession of your heart and is killing me a thousand times a day. love does, however, reassure me and i will continue to love you. 173 la mia anima stanca, desiderando raggiungervi, si separa dal cuore. amore la rende felice e triste al tempo stesso. my tired soul, desiring to reach you, separates itself from my heart. love makes me happy and sad at the same time. humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 148 174 continuerò ad amarvi, anche se non siete ancora sazia del mio dolore, e vorreste che le mie ferite fossero ancora più profonde. i will continue to love you, even if you are not yet satisfied with my pain and would like that my wounds were deeper. 175 il ricordo del tempo e del luogo accende il mio cuore come allora: il nodo che mi stringe a voi non potrà mai sciogliersi. the memory of the time and of the place ignites my heart as it did before: the knot that ties me to you can never be loosened. 176 amo la solitudine: nel silenzio di questi boschi, al fruscio delle fronde, sento la vostra presenza. i love the solitude: in the silence of these woods with the rustle of the fronds, i feel your presence. 177 la mia impresa è audace, ma per voi attraverserei mari e monti, anche senza guida. my endeavor is daring, but for you i would cross seas and mountains, even without a guide. 178 la mia passione per voi è un difficile viaggio fra fiducia e timore. il mio spirito è stanco e vorrei seguire la ragione, ma non ci riesco. my passion for you is a difficult voyage between trust and fear. my spirit is tired and i would like to follow reason, but i can not. 179 geri, rispondi con umiltà allo sdegno della tua donna, e lei ti ascolterà; perché fuggire non serve. geri, respond with humility to the scorn of your woman and she will listen to you, for escape is futile. 180 immenso po, le tue potenti acque trasportano solo il mio corpo; il mio cuore sta già tornando libero da lei. immense po, your powerful waters transport only my body; my heart is ready to be free again. 181 laura mi ha catturato in una rete di fili d’oro e perle: nessun uomo ha mai visto occhi così luminosi e mani così candide. laura captured me in a net of gold threads and pearls; no man has ever seen eyes so bright or hands so snow white. 182 amore incendia i cuori di passione e di gelosia. io credo in voi, quindi non sono geloso, ma condannato ad ardere giorno e notte. love sets fire to hearts of passion and jealousy. i believe in you; therefore, i am not jealous, but rather condemned to burn day and night. 183 il mio cuore trema: la donna è mutevole per natura, e so che potreste privarmi della luce del vostro sguardo. my heart trembles; woman is by nature fickle and i know that you could deprive me of the light of your eyes. 184 sento che la vostra forza viene meno: se morte dovesse privarmi di voi, ogni mia speranza sarebbe dissolta. i feel you growing weaker: if death were to deprive me of you, all of my hope would be lost. 185 siete la mia fenice e per voi potrei ardere anche alla più algida brina. you are my phoenix and for you, i could burn even the iciest frost. 186 se virgilio e omero avessero visto laura si sarebbero impegnati a celebrarla. spero solo che lei non disprezzi il mio modesto canto. if virgil and homer had seen laura, they would have committed themselves to celebration. i only hope that she does not scorn my modest song. 187 la mia laura si merita lo stile di omero, orfeo e virgilio: la sua luce my laura deserves the style of homer, orpheus, and virgil: her light resonates humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 149 risuona ben poco nel mio debole stile. too little in my weak style. 188 io e il sole ammiriamo la stessa dolce fronda, ma il sole fugge e l’ombra nasconde il luogo beato dove il grande lauro fu piccolo virgulto. the sun and i admire the sweet foliage, but the sun escapes and the shade hides the blessed place where the great laurel was a small sapling 189 la mia vita è come una nave governata dalla passione. una tempesta continua segna un percorso di errori e ignoranza, e non vedo il porto. my life is like a ship ruled by passion. a continuous storm marks a course of errors and ignorance and i do not see the port. 190 vidi una candida cerva dalle corna dorate in un’alba di primavera. ma era destinata alla libertà e in pieno sole scomparve. i saw a white doe with golden horns in the spring dawn. she was destined, however, for freedom and in the full sun disappeared. 191 sono al colmo della beatitudine: cosa potrei desiderare di più di fronte a questa immagine beatrice? i am at the height of bliss; what more could i want in front of me than this blessed image? 192 amore mio, dalla tua bellezza celeste scende una pioggia di dolcezza. i fiori ti cercano e il cielo gioisce della luce dei tuoi occhi. my love, from your celestial beauty falls a rain of sweetness. the flowers search for you and the sky rejoices in the light of your eyes. 193 non c’è cibo più nobile dell’immagine della mia amata. grazie a lei comprendo il valore di ogni cosa terrena e celeste. there is no food more noble than the image of my beloved. thanks to her, i comprehend the value of all things earthly and heavenly. 194 l’aura gentile della mia amata rigenera la natura, mi rasserena e mi abbaglia. il cielo non mi dà ali per fuggire da lei. the gentle breeze of my beloved regenerates nature and both soothes and blinds me. heaven does not give me wings to escape her. 195 il mare rimarrà senz’acqua e il cielo senza stelle prima che io smetta di amarti. solo la morte guarirà la ferita del mio cuore. the sea will be waterless and the sky starless before i stop loving you. only death will heal my wounded heart. 196 l’aura serena che muove le fronde intrecciava così armoniosamente i capelli d’oro di laura che ne rimasi turbato. lo sarò fino alla morte. the serene breeze that moves leaves so harmoniously wove laura’s hair that i was left upset. i will remain so until my death. 197 un’aura celeste muove il lauro, ha ferito apollo e mi ha fatto perdere la libertà. è come medusa: il suo sguardo può trasformarmi in marmo. a heavenly breeze moves the laurel, hurts apollo, and makes me lose my freedom. it is like medusa: one glance can turn me into marble. 198 l’aura soave fa vibrare i suoi capelli al sole; io non riesco a descrivere la sua bellezza: non la comprendo e sono stanco per la dolcezza. the gratifying breeze shakes her hair in the sun; i can not describe her beauty: i do not comprehend it and am tired for the sweetness. 199 mano perfetta, come mi stringi. le tue unghie feriscono il mio cuore. guanto perfect hand, how you hold me! your nails hurt my heart. precious glove, you humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 150 preziosissimo, presto mi toglierai il tesoro che ho ammirato. will soon take away from me the treasure i have admired. 200 le due mani rivestite dal guanto provocano il mio dolore, ma amore tende mille altri lacci, con le vostre mirabili e innocenti bellezze. the two hands covered by the glove cause my pain, but love sets a thousand other traps, with your wonderful and innocent beauty. 201 non voglio pensare a quel giorno in cui avevo tra le mani il guanto di laura, perché gliel’ho restituito senza fuggire da lei. i do not want to think of that day in which i had laura's glove between my hands because i returned it to her without running away from her. 202 amore mi uccide. solo la vostra pietà potrebbe salvarmi, ma nel vostro viso non ne trovo traccia. love kills me. only your pity could save me, but in your face, i do not find any trace of it. 203 com’è possibile che laura non sia commossa da poesie che farebbero innamorare tutte le altre? anche dopo la morte sarà la mia unica stella. how is it possible that laura is not moved by poetry that would make all the others fall in love? even after death she will be my only star. 204 sforzati, anima mia, di seguire quella luce divina che si trova in lei. hai voluto incontrarla. ora seguila fino al paradiso. force yourself, my soul, to follow that divine light that can be found in her. you wanted to meet her. now follow her to heaven. 205 che onore dire a laura che mi piace. mi domando se nel futuro sarò ammirato per il mio amore o invidiato perché ho visto la sua bellezza. what an honor to tell laura that i like her. i ask myself if in the future i will be admired for my love or envied because i saw her beauty. 206 che il cielo mi fulmini se ho detto qualcosa contro di lei. io non potrei dirlo per tutto l’oro del mondo né saprei vivere con un'altra. heaven strike me down if i said something against her. i could not say it for all the gold in the world nor could i live with another one. 207 possibile che dopo tanti anni di fedele amore debba ancora invocare uno sguardo furtivo? ma le mie pene sono il bene più grande che ci sia. is it possible that after many years of faithful love i have yet to invoke a furtive gaze? nonetheless, my pains are what are best in life. 208 magari potessi correre come il rodano! così potrei raggiungerla. ma sono stanco e il fiume può baciarla per me. if only i could flow like the rhône. in this way, i could reach her, but i am tired and the river can kiss her for me. 209 parto ma non posso mai partire dal bel giogo d’amore. sono un cervo ferito dalla saetta: quanto più lotto tanto più mi faccio male! i leave, but i can never part from that beautiful yoke of love. i am a deer wounded by the arrow: the more i fight, the more i hurt myself! 210 la tua dolcezza potrebbe colmare di gioia chiunque, ma non si accorge di me e io invecchio vedendo davanti a me un fato ostile. your sweetness could fill anyone with love, but it does not take notice of me and i grow old seeing before me a hostile fate. 211 dal mio desiderio nasce solo altro desiderio. sono in questo labirinto from my desire is born only more desire. i have been in this labyrinth of humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 151 d’amore dal 6 aprile 1327 e non ho scampo. love since april 6, 1327 and i have no way out. 212 da venti anni vivo nei sogni e scrivo nel vento! innamorato sotto una cattiva stella mi sono dedicato alla mia distruzione. for twenty years i have lived in dreams and written in the wind. falling in love under an unlucky star, i have dedicated myself to my ruin. 213 laura è così perfetta da racchiudere in sé la bellezza di tutte le donne! sono avvinto dalla sua magia. laura is so perfect that she holds within herself the beauty of all women! i am enthralled by her magic. 214 ecco, ancora una visione del mio amore per laura. la mia anima è prigioniera nel bosco ombroso della passione. che dio mi aiuti! here, another vision of my love for laura. my soul is imprisoned in the shaded woods of passion. god help me! 215 laura potrebbe esaurire le risorse mentali di un poeta sommo. la sua bellezza, il suo amore e la sua onestà possono trasformare il mondo. laura could consume the mental resources of a great poet. her beauty, her love and her honesty can transform the world. 216 per te vivo nel tormento e nell’afflizione, ma rimani la mia sola passione, e mi duole che mi rifiuti il tuo soccorso. for you, i live in torment and distress, but you remain my only passion and it hurts me that you deny me your assistance. 217 ho cessato i lamenti, ora canto solo la sua bellezza divina e la mia poesia dirà quanto è dolce questo morire d’amore. i ceased the laments. now i sing only of your divine beauty and my poetry will say how sweet it is to die of love. 218 amore sembra dirmi che il mondo è più bello grazie a laura. certo se lei dovesse mancare il mondo diventerebbe un luogo oscuro e desolato. love seems to tell me that the world is more beautiful thanks to laura. if she were to be missing, the world would become dark and desolate. 219 saluto l’aurora al canto degli uccelli. ma il sole che cancella le stelle è oscurato dalla luce solare della mia amata. i salute dawn in harmony with the birds’ song, but the solar light of my beloved obscures the sun that obfuscates the stars. 220 amore dove hai trovato una bellezza così divina e un canto così celestiale? da dove viene la luce sublime che mi brucia e raggela? love, where did you find a beauty so divine and a song so celestial? from where does the sublime light that burns and freezes me come? 221 nel campo di battaglia dell’amore sono sempre sconfitto. i suoi occhi mi feriscono con una dolcezza che rende inermi le mie parole. on the battlefield of love, i am always defeated. her eyes wound me with a sweetness that makes my words defenseless. 222 ditemi o liete donne dov’è laura? invidia e gelosia ci privano della sua compagnia: l’anima non si limita ma l’ira paralizza il corpo. o happy women, where is laura? envy and jealousy deny us of her company. the soul does not limit itself, but ire paralyzes the body. 223 quando il sole sprofonda nel mare comincia il mio tormento. solo il sole when the sun sinks into the sea, my torment begins. only the sun that burns humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 152 che brucia e alletta il cuore può alleviare il mio dolore. and allures my heart can alleviate my sorrow. 224 amandovi io mi strazio e mi distruggo. la colpa è vostra, ma il danno è tutto mio. by loving you, i torment and destroy myself. it is your fault, but the damage is all mine. 225 ho visto dodici donne felici, poi le stesse donne in un carro trionfale con al centro laura. vorrei essere stato alla guida di quel carro. i saw twelve happy women, then the same women in a triumphant cart with laura at the center. i would like to have been driving that cart. 226 le verdi rive e le ombrose colline dove laura vive sono il solo luogo che amo. lontano da lei ogni attimo è pena. the green banks and the shaded hills where laura lives are the only place that i love. far from her, every moment is suffering. 227 felice aura che muovi le sue chiome bionde, tu sei negli occhi che mandano gli strali amorosi che mi colpiscono anche da lontano. happy breeze that moves her blonde hair, you are in the eyes that send the amorous arrows that strike me even from afar. 228 il lauro che cresce nel mio cuore è pieno di bellezza e virtù: è il mio amore per laura, che io considero sacro. the laurel that grows in my heart is full of beauty and virtue: it is my love for laura that i consider sacred. 229 cantai, ora piango, ma la radice della mia amarezza è così dolce che non c’è condizione più nobile della mia. i sang; now i cry, but the root of my bitterness is so sweet that there is no condition nobler than my own. 230 piansi, e ora canto: gli occhi di laura non nascondono più il loro splendore e pietà mi manda un ulivo in segno di pace. i cried, and now i sing; laura’s eyes no longer hide their splendor and pity sends me an olive branch as a sign of peace. 231 ero felice del mio fato. ma ora una scura foschia copre i tuoi occhi bellissimi! o natura o dio come potete distruggere tanta bellezza? i was happy with my fate. a fog now covers those beautiful eyes! o nature, o god, how can you destroy such beauty? 232 l’ira travolse anche alessandro magno. diffidate dell’ira perché è una condizione di pazzia che può portare alla morte. ire overwhelmed even alexander the great! distrust it, for it is a condition of madness that can lead to death. 233 la tua malattia agli occhi mi ha contagiato: il cielo e l’amore mi sono più favorevoli! natura e pietà seguono il loro corso. your sore eyes infected me: heaven and love were more favorable to me! nature and mercy follow their course. 234 camera mia, testimone dei miei tormenti, non sei più rifugio ai miei penosi travagli. ora cerco conforto fra il volgo. o my room, witness of my torments, you are no longer refuge to my sorrowful anguishes. i now seek comfort in the crowd. 235 navigo in questo tempestoso mare senza controllo. le lacrime e i venti d’infiniti sospiri mi sospingono verso la i navigate in this tempestuous sea without control. the tears and the winds of infinite sighs push me onward toward humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 153 rovina. ruin. 236 io sbaglio e vedo il mio errore ma non posso resistere l’attrazione di questa fiamma. la disperazione rende ardita la mia anima. i err and i see my mistake, but i can not resist the attraction of this flame. desperation makes my soul brave. 237 vago al chiarore della luna, cercando il conforto del silenzio. se fossi con me vorrei che non arrivasse mai l’alba. i wander in the moonlight, seeking the comfort of silence. if you were with me, i would like that dawn would never arrive. 238 la vostra, caro principe, è celeste saggezza! fra tante avete saputo scegliere! come invidio il bacio sulla fronte che le avete dato. yours is a celestial wisdom, dear prince: among many women, you knew whom to choose! how i envy the kiss you gave her forehead. 239 siete insensibile come un’aspra rupe e la mia poesia sembra voler trattenere il vento con una rete o conservare i fiori nel ghiaccio. you are insensitive like a rugged cliff and my poetry seems to want to hold the wind with a net or conserve flowers in ice. 240 il piacere ha vinto la ragione ma non potevo contrastare l’influsso delle stelle e ho chiesto perdono per questo. pleasure beat reason, but i could not oppose the influence of the stars and i asked forgiveness for this. 241 il mio cuore è già ferito mortalmente e come se non bastasse ora vi vedo soffrire: la compassione accende il mio desiderio. my heart is already mortally wounded and it is as if it was not enough, i now see you suffering: compassion ignites my desire. 242 solo ora capisco che partendo le ho lasciato il mio cuore. only now do i understand that in leaving, i left her my heart. 243 sono come un sasso perché il mio cuore ti segue ovunque per ricordarti le mie lacrime e il mio tormento amoroso. i am like a rock because my heart follows you everywhere in order to remind you of my tears and of my amorous torment. 244 caro amico, il mio delirio è simile al tuo. raccogliamo le forze e rivolgiamo l’anima al cielo perché il nostro cammino è lungo e impervio. dear friend, my delirium is like yours. let us collect our forces and direct the soul to the sky, for our path is long and inaccessible. 245 chi sarà quel vecchio saggio che dona due rose a quella coppia di giovani amanti e li guarda con tanta dolcezza? who will be that old wise man who gifts two roses to that couple of young lovers and looks at them with such sweetness? 246 laura rapisce ogni anima, con la sua grazia sorprendente. non posso rimanere nel mondo senza di lei: dio fammi morire prima di perderla. laura fascinates every soul with her surprising grace. i can not remain in the world without her: god let me die before losing her. 247 lingua umana non può lodare la divinità di laura, ma amore spinge i poeti a descrivere le cose divine per destino. human language can not praise laura’s divinity, but love pushes poets to describe divine things for destiny. 248 la morte incombe sulle creature piene death looms over the creatures full of humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 154 di grazia e virtù come laura. deve affrettarsi chi vuole vederla o piangerà per sempre. grace and virtue, like laura. he who wants to see her must hurry, or he will cry forever. 249 l’ultimo incontro mi ha turbato. laura non era serena come prima. temo per lei. dio mi assista. the last encounter unsettled me. laura was not as serene as before. i fear for her. god help me. 250 la donna dei miei sogni adesso è un incubo: sembra dirmi che se ne andrà per sempre. the woman of my dreams is now a nightmare: she seems to tell me that she will leave forever. 251 che visione! è possibile che laura debba morire così presto? se non posso più vedere il suo bel viso, voglio subito morire anch’io! what a vision! is it possible that laura must die so soon? if i can not see her beautiful face anymore, i want to die immediately as well! 252 devo piangere o cantare? temere o sperare? laura era il nostro sole. senza lei sono diverso, vivo in perpetua guerra e vago senza meta. must i cry or sing? fear or hope? laura was our sun. without her, i am different; i live in perpetual war and i wander without purpose. 253 come mi manca laura! che inganno è l’amore! la fortuna la allontana da me e ogni piacere è dissolto senza di lei. o how i miss laura! what a trick is love! fortune distances her from me and every pleasure is dissolved without her. 254 laura è morta o no? il mio cuore è lacerato. posso capire perché dio la vuole con sé, ma ora anche la mia vita è finita. is laura dead or not? my heart is lacerated. i can understand why god wants her with him, but now my life is finished as well. 255 agli amanti piace la sera; a me piace l’aurora quando posso contemplare due soli, uno risplende in cielo e l’altro nel mio cuore. lovers like the evening; i, however, like the dawn when i can contemplate the two suns, one shining in the sky and the other in my heart. 256 di notte sono un leone che ruggisce nella passione. l'anima staccata dal corpo raggiunge laura: se almeno riuscisse per vendetta a svegliarla! at night, i am a lion that roars with passion. the soul separated from the body reaches laura. if only it could, for revenge, wake her! 257 con la mia immaginazione sono in grado di ammirare il tuo volto anche se lo nascondi, tanto è forte la passione che anima il mio cuore. with my imagination, i am capable of admiring your face even if you hide it; the passion that animates my heart is that strong. 258 laura sa essere anche nobile e benevola con me. finalmente la mia anima può riprendersi dopo tante pene. laura knows to be also noble and benevolent with me. my soul can finally recover after such pains. 259 cerco la solitudine dei boschi, delle pianure e dei fiumi per fuggire la corrotta avignone. almeno oggi ho potuto stringere la vostra mano! i seek the solitude of the woods, the plains and the rivers in order to escape from corrupt avignon. at least today i could shake your hand. 260 perché una bellezza così eccelsa e impareggiabile è giunta così tardi sulla terra e se ne va così presto? why has such a lofty and unique beauty come on earth so late only to leave so soon? humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 155 261 laura è un modello di perfezione ed eccellenza per tutte le donne. ma la sua bellezza divina è inimitabile laura is a model of perfection and excellence for all women. her divine beauty is, however, inimitable. 262 l’essenziale per una donna è l’onestà: solo l’onestà è più importante della vita e apre le porte del cielo. i filosofi dovrebbero capirlo. essential for a woman is honesty: only honesty is more important than life and opens heaven’s doors. the philosophers should understand it. 263 la tua onestà sarà simbolo di una dignità ed eccellenza diversa e migliore di quella che speravo dalle fronde del lauro. your honesty will be a symbol of a dignity and a different, better excellence than that for which i hoped from the branches of the laurel. 264 penso alla morte e mi rivolgo a dio ma non riesco a liberarmi dalla gloria e dall’amore. vedo il meglio ma mi attacco al peggio. i think of death and i turn to god, but i can not free myself from glory and love. i see the best, but i attach myself to the worst. 265 una volontà così ferrea, un cuore così freddo non si sono mai visti. ho buoni motivi per lamentarmi della mia sorte, ma continuo a sperare. a will so strong and a heart so cold have never been seen. i have good motives to lament about my fate, but i continue to hope. 266 caro amico, da anni ormai non c’è niente di peggio per me che non vedere né voi né laura: siete i legami più forti della mia vita. dear friend, for years already there is nothing worse for me than not seeing you or laura; you both are the strongest ties of my life. 267 sono costretto ad ardere per laura e a vivere di lei, anche se la morte mi ha privato di lei: di tutto il resto mi importa ben poco. i am forced to burn for laura and to live on her, even if death has deprived me of her: for the rest, i care very little. 268 dovrei uccidermi per il dolore che provo per la sua morte. ma se voglio rivederla in cielo, devo continuare a celebrarla in terra. i should kill myself for the pain i feel due to her death. if i want to see here in heaven, however, i must continue to praise her on earth. 269 ho perso laura e l’altra colonna della mia vita. devo rassegnarmi al mio destino. la vita appare bella ma puoi perdere tutto in un attimo. i lost laura and the other column of my life. i must resign to my destiny. life appears beautiful, but you can lose everything in a moment. 270 la morte mi ha sciolto, amore, da ogni tua legge; quella che fu la mia donna è fuggita in cielo, lasciando triste e libera la mia vita. death has released me, love, from every one of your laws; she who was my woman has escaped to heaven, leaving my life sad and vacant. 271 la morte ha sciolto il nodo ardente che stringeva il mio cuore, amore ci sta riprovando, ma la morte ha vinto ancora. death has loosened the burning knot that gripped my heart. love is trying again, but death has still won. 272 sono stanco di navigare in questo mare sempre in tempesta: non c’è guida o porto sicuro per il mio cuore. i am tired of navigating this evertempestuous sea: there is no safe guide or port for my heart. humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 156 273 le sue parole gentili e gli sguardi dolci sono scomparsi, voglio dimenticarmi di loro. qui nulla mi piace, ora voglio guardare il cielo. her gentile words and sweet gazes have disappeared; i want to forget them. i do not like anything here, now i want to look at the sky. 274 o cuore sleale, scorta dei miei nemici mortali, come puoi ancora ospitare i messaggi segreti di amore e le sue illusioni? o disloyal heart, escort of my mortal enemies, how can your still host the secret messages of love and his illusions? 275 piedi miei non potete più raggiungerla. occhi ed orecchie, non potete più vederla e udirla. quindi perché mi procurate tanto affanno? my feet, you can never reach her again. eyes and ears, you can never see or hear her again. why then do you provoke such grief? 276 o morte, avete tolto l’unica fonte di luce della mia vita, lasciandomi cieco e sconsolato. con la poesia cerco di alleviare il dolore. o death, you have taken my life’s only source of light, leaving me blind and disconsolate. with poetry, i seek to alleviate the pain. 277 naufrago in questo desolato mare, non vedo più la mia guida, anche se la sento nel cuore dove mi appare dal cielo. shipwrecked in this desolate sea, i can not see my guide anymore, although i feel her in my heart where she appears from the sky. 278 come pesa la vita, un tempo vivace e lieta, ora fredda ed affannosa per la sua morte. sarebbe stato meglio morire con lei tre anni fa. how heavy is life, once lively and happy, now cold and troubled due to her death. it would have been better to die with her three years ago. 279 solo e pensoso sulla riva, vi sento nel vento estivo e nel mormorio delle onde. i miei occhi vedranno la vostra luce di nuovo dopo la morte. alone and pensive on the shore, i hear you in the summer wind and in the murmur of the waves. my eyes will see your light again after death. 280 la natura parla di amore eterno, ma senza laura sulla terra per me non è più possibile essere felice e lei mi chiama in cielo. nature speaks of love eternal, but without laura on earth, for me it is no longer possible to be happy. she calls me to heaven. 281 ho finalmente visto laura vicino al fiume: era una ninfa benevola e sembrava bella come una donna viva. i finally saw laura near the river: she was a benevolent nymph and she seemed as beautiful as a living woman. 282 anima beata le tue apparizioni nei miei sogni rallegrano i miei giorni tristi. ti riconosco, questo mi conforta. blessed soul, your apparitions in my dreams made my sad days happy. i recognize you and this comforts me. 283 laura mi consola mentre piango. quando il suo spirito torna, la mia vita risplende della sua bellezza, e vorrei esprimerla nelle mie rime. laura comforts me while i cry. when her spirit comes back, my life shines from her beauty and i would like to express it through my rhymes. 284 la morte mi ha preso tutto ma benedico l’istante in cui amore è entrato nel mio cuore. l’immaginazione mi restituisce laura, ma non basta. death has taken everything from me. i bless the moment in which love entered my heart. imagination gives laura back to me; it is not enough. humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 157 285 l'anima soffre senza di lei l’esilio terreno. le sue visite brevi confortano il mio cuore afflitto con la pietà di una madre e una sposa. the soul suffers terrestrial exile without her. her brief visits comfort my afflicted heart with the mercy of a mother and of a bride. 286 nei miei sogni lei ritorna e con grande dolcezza e compassione mi invita a non abbandonare la retta via. in my dreams, she comes back and with great sweetness and compassion, she invites me not to abandon the right path. 287 o sennuccio mio! ora sei felice nella sfera di venere e ti prego di salutare la mia signora e i poeti d’amore che sono beati con te. o my sennuccio! now you are happy in venus’s sphere and i beg you to greet my lady and the poets of love that are blessed with you. 288 ho riempito l’aria di sospiri dalla sua improvvisa partenza. non c’è niente in questi monti che non sappia quanto è amara la mia pena. i filled the air with sighs since her sudden departure. there is nothing in these mountains that does not know the bitterness of my anguish. 289 ora capisco che lei si oppose al mio desiderio per la mia salvezza, e le sono grato. quindi continuerò a onorarla con i miei versi. now i understand that she opposed my desire for my salvation; i am grateful to her. i will continue, therefore, to honor her with my verses. 290 ora mi rende felice ciò che prima mi faceva soffrire. il suo soave sdegno ha frenato il mio ardore e mi ha salvato. what used to make me suffer now makes me happy. her pleasing scorn held my ardor back and saved me. 291 dopo la morte di laura vorrei essere come titone, che ogni notte ritrovava la sua aurora! after laura’s death, i wish to be like tithonus, who found his aurora again every night! 292 per lei ho dimenticato me stesso, ma ora non mi resta che polvere e un interminabile pianto. for her, i forgot myself, but now there is nothing for me, only dust and endless weeping. 293 il mio unico intento era cantare la tua bellezza, ma dopo tua morte che senso ha la poesia? my only intent was to sing your beauty, but after your death what sense does poetry have? 294 soleva essere bella e viva nel mio cuore e ora non c’è più. veramente siamo polvere e ombre, veramente ogni speranza è illusione. she used to be beautiful and alive in my heart and now she is not anymore. we are truly dust and shadow; every hope is only illusion. 295 i miei pensieri solevano parlare di te che meriti di essere in cielo per la tua virtù, mentre io rimango in terra con la mia passione. my thoughts used to talk about you who deserves to be in heaven for your virtue, whereas i stay on earth with my passion. 296 ero solito accusarmi di essere in questa prigione. adesso sono fiero di quanto ho sofferto e canterò per sempre ciò che ho perduto. i used to accuse myself for being in this prison. now i am proud of how much i have suffered and i will always sing that which i have lost. 297 mentre tardo a raggiungerla in cielo proverò a rendere immortale il suo nome con la mia stanca poesia. while i delay to reach her in heaven, i will try to make her name immortal through my tired poetry. humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 158 298 gli anni hanno distrutto tutto! ho disperso i pensieri d’amore, e sono la più miserevole creatura della terra. the years have destroyed everything! i wasted thoughts of love and i am the most miserable creature on earth. 299 dov’è la bellezza che mi ha condotto? dov’è colei che ebbe in mano la mia vita? quanto manca in questo mondo di lacrime! where is the beauty that guided me? where is the woman who had my life in her hands? how much she is missed in this world of tears! 300 provo invidia per la terra, il cielo, le anime che sono in tua dolce compagnia. perché la morte ancora non mi chiama? i feel envy for earth, the sky and the souls that are in your sweet company. why does death not yet call me? 301 torno ai luoghi del mio amore, sono rimasti gli stessi ma io ora vedo solo il paese da cui è salita in cielo. i go back to the places of my love. they have remained the same, but all i can see now is the place from which she ascended to heaven. 302 il pensiero mi ha portato da laura tra i beati. l'intelletto non può capire la sua beatitudine ma lei mi ha detto che mi aspetta proprio lì. my thought brought me to laura among the blessed. the intellect can not understand her bliss, but she told me she waits for me there. 303 eccomi ancora nei luoghi di un tempo. la morte di laura li ha resi cupi ed oscuri. non c’è più luce nei miei giorni. here i am again in the places of one time. laura’s death made them gloomy and cloudy. there is no light in my days anymore. 304 non era colpa di amore, allora non ero saggio come adesso e il mio canto era inadeguato; ma con laura è morta anche la poesia. it was not love’s fault: at those times, i was not as wise as now and my song was inadequate. with laura, the poetry died too. 305 oh, anima bella che riposi in pace, guardami dal cielo, l’insano desiderio è dissolto e ora puoi ascoltare sicura i miei sospiri. oh, beautiful soul that rests in peace, look at me from heaven. the insane desire is dissolved and you can now listen to my sighs. 306 mentre cammino come un animale selvatico in un deserto oscuro, le tue orme luminose continuano ad indicarmi la strada verso la beatitudine. while i walk like a wild animal in a dark desert, your bright footprints continue to indicate the path toward bliss. 307 ho chiesto troppo alla poesia: chi troppo vuole nulla stringe e non si può riuscire in ciò che è superiore alle proprie forze. i asked too much of poetry: i am more fragile than i thought i was and no one can succeed in that which is superior in strength. 308 ha tramutato in amarezza la sua angelica dolcezza e il mio stile è inadeguato a comunicare la bellezza della sua anima. she turned her angelic sweetness into bitterness and my style is inadequate to communicate the beauty of her soul. 309 amore mi concede tanta bellezza. forse però solo il silenzio della contemplazione ha il potere di coglierla. love grants me so much beauty, but perhaps only the silence of contemplation has the ability to grasp it. 310 nemmeno zefiro e il bel tempo not even zephyrus and the fair weather humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 159 primaverile possono farmi sentire felice. i campi in fiore per me sono un deserto aspro e selvaggio. of spring can make me feel happy. to me, the blooming fields are a harsh and wild desert. 311 non immaginavo che la morte potesse toccare una dea, ora capisco che niente è sicuro, e piango con l’usignolo. i did not imagine that death could touch a goddess, now i realize that nothing is certain, and i cry with the nightingale. 312 tutta la bellezza e i piaceri del mondo non potrebbero riempire il vuoto nel mio cuore. la vita per me è così penosa e senza senso. all the beauty and the pleasures of the world could not fill the emptiness in my heart. for me, life is so pitiful and senseless. 313 la morte di laura mi fa soffrire, lei ha portato con sé il mio cuore e la mia anima. potessi morire e raggiungerla! laura’s death makes me suffer. she took my heart and my soul with her. if only i could die and reach her! 314 perché non mi sono reso conto che quella era l’ultima volta che l’avrei vista? forse la mia anima e la mia mente erano distratte. why did i not realize that was the last time i would have seen her? maybe my soul and my mind were distracted. 315 laura mi ha cambiato, ma poi la morte me l’ha portata via troppo presto. era certamente gelosa della mia felicità. laura changed me, but then death took her away from me too early. he was certainly jealous of my happiness. 316 la morte ha rovinato il mio futuro di pace con laura, ma so che lei mi vede dal cielo e piange. death ruined my peaceful future with laura, but i know she sees me from heaven and cries. 317 ero sul punto di vivere un rapporto sereno e maturo con lei, ma la morte non me ne ha concesso il tempo. i was about to live a serene and mature relationship with her, but death did not give me enough time. 318 l’alloro divelto e caduto è ormai in cielo, la sua immagine vive nella mia poesia e continuo a chiamarla pur rimanendo senza risposta. the wrecked and fallen laurel is already in heaven. her image lives in my poetry and i continue to call her although she never responds. 319 non riporre fiducia nelle cose del mondo, instabili e crudeli! ciò che più conta è la beatitudine dell’anima. do not put your trust in the unstable and cruel things of the world! the bliss of the soul is what counts more. 320 cerco rifugio dove lei nacque, ma anche la natura sembra respingermi. la passione era un signore crudele e ora piango le sue ceneri i seek shelter where she was born, but nature also seems to ward me off. passion was a cruel lord and i now cry for his ashes. 321 quanto è misero il mio stato! potessi almeno trovare conforto dove la mia fenice volò via dal nido, tenendo sotto le sue ali il mio cuore how pitiful is my condition! i wish i could find comfort where my phoenix flew away from the nest, keeping my heart under her wings. 322 quanto mi manchi, mio nobile amico! piango per i tuoi versi e perché non potrai leggere i miei! quale astro ci ha diviso? how i miss you, my noble friend! i cry for your verses and because you will not be able to read mine! which star has divided us? 323 ho visto morte e distruzione di una i saw the death and destruction of a humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 160 fiera, una nave, un lauro, una fonte e una fenice. solo la donna morsa dal serpente era serena e sicura. beast, a ship, a laurel, a spring and a phoenix. only the woman bitten by the snake was safe and calm. 324 si sarebbero realizzate le mie speranze se non fosse intervenuta la morte, sommergendomi di dolore. my hopes would have been realized if death had not intervened, immersing me in pain. 325 o morte crudele! non avresti potuto uccidere un corpo più bello! ma la nobile anima era prigioniera del bel corpo e ora si è liberata. o cruel death! you could not have killed a more beautiful body! the noble soul was, however, trapped in the body and has now been liberated. 326 o morte crudele! hai offeso amore portando laura in cielo e lasciando sulla terra solo il suo ricordo. non hai pietà di me! o cruel death! you offended love by bringing laura to heaven and leaving only her memory on earth. you have no mercy for me! 327 o morte crudele! hai svuotato il mondo; ora ti combatto con la poesia, lasciando le mie parole a consacrare laura. o cruel death! you have emptied the world; now i fight you with poetry, leaving my words to consecrate laura. 328 o morte crudele! hai rubato gli ultimi giorni felici della mia vita, lasciandomi ad aspettare di raggiungere laura in paradiso. o cruel death! you stole the last happy days of my life, leaving me to wait to reach laura in heaven. 329 o giorno fatale! le stelle hanno congiurato contro la mia felicità e non me ne sono accorto, tanto ero abbagliato dalla sua bellezza. o fatal day! the stars have conjured against my happiness and i did not realize it because i was so blinded by her beauty. 330 non ho visto in quel dolce, vago sguardo l’imminente termine della sua vita mortale. i suoi occhi mi placano: aspetteró il mio tempo. i did not see in that sweet, vague gaze the imminent end of her mortal life. her eyes placate me. i will wait for my time. 331 in vita di laura era la mia luce, se avessi capito la sua fine imminente avrei potuto andarmene prima di lei per aspettarla io in cielo. in life, laura was my light. if i had understood her imminent death, i would have been able to leave before her to wait for her in heaven. 332 la sua morte ha trasformato me e il mio stile: passo le mie notti nel pianto, pensando ai ricordi lieti e invoco la morte. her death transformed both my style and myself. i spend my nights crying, thinking of the happy memories and i invoke death. 333 non vedo piú il tuo sembiante mortale, nascosto in luogo basso e oscuro. mi attira la tua condizione beata: aspettami, non posso tardare! i can not see your mortal countenance, hidden in a low and dark place. your blessed condition attracts me. wait for me! i can not be late! 334 un tempo la mia incrollabile lealtà verso di voi vi spaventava. ora però riconoscete l’onestà del mio desiderio. accoglietemi in paradiso. one time, my steadfast loyalty toward you scared you. now, however, you recognize the honesty of my desire. greet me in heaven. humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 161 335 fra mille donne, eravate l’unica simile in vista agli spiriti celesti. questo era troppo per me, per questo mi avete lasciato indietro. among a thousand women, you were the only similar in sight to the celestial spirits. this was too much for me; for this, you left me behind. 336 ricordo il nostro primo incontro ma so bene che nel milletrecentoquarantotto, il sesto giorno di aprile, nell’ora prima siete morta. i remember our first encounter, but i know well that in 1348, on the sixth day of april, in the first hour, you died. 337 dio ha voluto adornare il cielo con il profumo di laura che estasiava il mondo. il mio desiderio per lei mi faceva tremare al fuoco. god wanted to adorn the sky with laura’s perfume that delighted the world. my desire for her made me tremble at the fire. 338 non la conobbe il mondo finché visse. ora il cielo si gioisce della sua presenza e si avvantaggia del mio pianto. the world did not know her while she lived. now, in heaven, it rejoices in her presence and takes advantage of my torment. 339 la mia debole vista umana non sopporta la visione dell’infinito che sento in laura. la scrittura non è che una goccia nel mare senza fine. my weak human sight does not stand the infinite vision that i feel in laura. writing is only a drop in the endless sea. 340 mi mancano le dolci visioni di laura nei miei sogni. vorrei che lei lasciasse il cielo e venisse a confortare il mio tormento sulla terra. i miss the sweet visions of laura in my dreams. i wish she would leave heaven and would come to comfort my torment on earth. 341 come un angelo pietoso porti conforto alla mia angoscia e mi fai rinascere. sei beata perché sai rendere beati gli altri. like a merciful angel, you bring comfort to my anguish and you revive me. you are blessed because you bless others. 342 con le tue parole mi porti conforto nelle mie notti, mi trasmetti una dolcezza che nessun mortale sentì mai. with your words, you bring me comfort at night and you transmit to me a sweetness that no mortal has ever felt. 343 laura mi appare in sogno verso l’alba e io sfogo il mio dolore; poi torna in cielo con gli occhi pieni di lacrime. laura appears to me in my dream toward dawn and i vent my pain; then, she returns to heaven with eyes filled with tears. 344 un tempo l'amore era dolce, ora è molto amaro. la tua morte mi ha privato di ogni bene. once, love was sweet. now, it is incredibly bitter. your death has denied me of everything. 345 sono confortato di non vederti in questa prigione terreste: ti vedo in volo insieme agli angeli per raggiungere il tuo e mio signore. i am comforted to not see you in this terrestrial prison. i see you flying together with the angels in order to reach our lord. 346 quando lei è arrivata in cielo gli altri spiriti eletti si sono fatti incontro pieni di stupore. ora mi sussurra di arrivare in fretta. when she arrived in heaven, the other chosen spirits approached, filled with wonder. now she whispers to me to hastily arrive. humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 162 347 ora che vedi il mio amore nella mente di dio, che sa ogni cosa, ti puoi fidare: prega che possa raggiungerti presto. now that you see my love in god’s mind, that is omniscient, you can trust. pray that i will be able to join you soon. 348 tanta perfezione non si era mai vista al mondo. ora la tua bellezza diletta dio ed io sono rimasto qui senza di te. prega che arrivi presto. such perfection had never been seen in the world. now, your beauty delights god; i have remained here without you. pray that i arrive soon. 349 vorrei sapere quando arriverà il giorno felice in cui lascerò questa prigione terrena e vedrò il mio signore e la mia donna. i would like to know when the happy day in which i will leave this terrestrial prison will arrive and i will see my lord and my woman. 350 mai c’è stata, né c’è, né ci sarà sulla terra una bellezza come la tua! vorrei essere in cielo per continuare a contemplarti eternamente. a beauty such as yours did not, does not, and will not exist on earth! i would like to be in heaven in order to admire you for eternity. 351 quegli sguardi crudeli che fanno innamorare si sono opposti alla mia passione, ma ora capisco che devo a loro la mia salvezza. those cruel gazes that make me fall in love were opposed to my passion, but only now do i realize that i owe them my salvation. 352 ti ho visto camminare come un angelo tra l’erba e le viole, ma ora dopo il tuo ritorno al creatore tutto è solo ricordo e oscurità. i saw you walk like an angel in the grass and violets, but now, after your return to the creator, everything is only memory and obscurity. 353 vieni usignolo, c'è abbastanza spazio per tutti e due, condividiamo le nostre pene e ricordiamo assieme i nostri cari. come nightingale, there is enough space for both to share our sufferings and together remember our loved ones. 354 amore, dammi la facoltà di celebrare la lode somma di laura e le sue virtù che tanto piacciono al cielo. love, give me the authority to praise laura’s eulogy and her virtues that so please heaven. 355 ho tenuto i mie occhi fissi su ciò che mi danneggia. è tempo di rivolgere i pensieri al cielo anche se l’anima non si allontana dall’amore. i kept my eyes fixed on what damages me. it is time to direct my thoughts to heaven, although the soul does not distance itself from love. 356 l’aura celeste soffia sul mio sonno inquieto. le esprimo il mio dolore e lei piange e sospira e io sono vinto dal dolore fino al risveglio. the celestial breeze blows on my tormented sleep. i express my pain and she cries and sighs. the pain overwhelms me until my awakening. 357 nulla più mi trattiene in questa vita: seguirò la luce del cielo che si riflette così intensamente nel profondo del mio cuore. nothing holds me in this life anymore. i will follow the light of heaven that is so intensely reflected deep within my heart. 358 com’è dolce per me la morte dalla morte di laura! cristo mi è di esempio e lei mi mostra la via che porta al cielo. how sweet death is to me since laura’s death! christ is my example and she shows me the path that leads to heaven. 359 laura, la tua bella apparizione che laura, your beautiful appearance that humanist studies & the digital age lollini & rosenberg 4.1 (2015) 163 viene a consolarmi di notte mi mostra la giusta direzione, ma mi priva totalmente dal riposo. comes to console me at night shows me the right direction, but it totally deprives me of rest. 360 nel processo contro amore, io ero il testimone di tante sofferenze. amore si è difeso e la ragione non ha saputo giudicare. in the trial against love, i was the witness of much suffering. love defended himself and reason did not know how to judge. 361 il mio specchio dice che sono vecchio, così vuole la natura. il tempo vola e il sogno è finito. ma lei è ancora nel mio cuore. my mirror says that i am old, as nature intended. time flies and the dream is over. yet, she is still in my heart. 362 con le ali del pensiero sono salito al cielo. laura ama il mio cambiamento, mi porta a godere della vista del suo volto e di quello di dio. on the wings of thought, i ascended to heaven. laura loves my change and she brings me to enjoy the sight of her face and god’s. 363 laura è polvere, il mio lauro è spento. libero da amore, stanco di vivere, torno al mio signore. laura is dust. my laurel is lifeless. freed from love and tired of living, i return to my lord. 364 ho perso molti anni nella follia amorosa, ora chiedo a dio di salvarmi perché conosco il mio errore e non lo giustifico. i lost many years in mad love. now, i ask god to save me because i understand my error and i do not justify it. 365 potevo essere caro al cielo, ma sono rimasto a terra smarrito. dio, prendimi con te, affinché possa morire in pace. i could have been beloved to heaven, but i have remained misplaced on earth. god, take me with you so that i may die in peace. 366 vergin bella vieni a salvarmi, fammi la grazia. vergine non mi lasciar sull’estremo passo! sostienimi, raccoglimi in pace. beautiful virgin, save me, grant me the grace. virgin, do not leave me during this ultimate step! support me, gather me to you in peace. 